Dealing in literary estates – culture – SZ.de

When the German Literature Archive in Marbach recently announced that it had acquired Martin Walser’s legacy, there was immediate speculation as to how much money may have gone into the writer’s manuscript archive, which is no less than 75,000 pages long, and the author’s working library. It must have been a sizable amount. In order to legitimize the considerable financial commitment, the press release emphasized that Walser had received the Georg Büchner Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the International Friedrich Nietzsche Prize. But how was it possible to establish the current common link between archival requests for inheritance and literary prices?

100 years ago, in the summer of 1922, a small group of professors worked hard to nominate a German writer and legacy virtuoso for the Nobel Prize in Literature: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Certainly not a name that comes to mind first when asked about prize-winning women writers of the early 20th century. As early as 1908, 1916 and 1917 Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister had been nominated for the Swedish Literature Prize by the Halle philosophy professor Hans Vaihinger. In 1922 the classical philologist Georg Goetz, the Germanist Ernst Bertram, the historian Kurt Breysig and Hans Vaihinger finally made a great last attempt, albeit in vain.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s handling of her brother’s manuscripts already shows all the essential elements of today’s probate practice

For the supporters of Förster-Nietzsche, she was a remarkable writer as the author of various biographical writings about her brother. However, this position was not convincing in Stockholm. If you look at the reports of the Swedish Academy, it says as early as 1908 that the writings of the nominees were “uncritical and anecdotal” and “extremely biased”. In 1916, too, there was again talk that the Nietzsche biography was “by no means objective and critical”. It seemed obvious to the Swedish Academy that Förster-Nietzsche’s journalistic activities met neither philological nor historical standards. The repeated nominations therefore led to the assumption that the efforts of the German professors were more likely due to “the admiration and piety for Nietzsche than an equally high esteem for the sister’s biography”.

The academy was not entirely wrong. A bundle in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar gives an insight into the preparations for the nominations: the German professors valued Förster-Nietzsche above all because she had rendered outstanding services to her brother’s estate as the founder of the Nietzsche Archive. She was to be honored as “the spiritual director and soul of the archive”.

In fact, since the death of her brother, the archive set up by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in Weimar had dealt with his brother’s manuscripts in a way that already shows all the essential elements of today’s probate practice: she collected all unpublished material, from posthumous work drafts to incidental ones Sketches and notes on the side. She had many papers that were not intended for publication printed in various editions of Nietzsche’s works. In the longer term, she planned a monumental “complete edition of all writings”. But that’s not all. As in today’s literary archives, she took care of the preservation of Nietzsche’s working library, endeavored to obtain all the first prints of the philosopher and collected the Nietzsche research that was already blossoming. According to a nomination letter, the sister’s achievement was that she “on” all of this one place”.

As the philosopher Vaihinger explained in his letter of nomination from 1916, the Stockholm prize money should finally put these activities on a secure financial footing. He assures that he “personally guarantees that, should Dr. Förster-Nietzsche receive the literature prize, it will be used exclusively for the purposes of the Nietzsche Foundation”. In Stockholm, the internal report noted that while the Swedish Academy is authorized to award a Nobel Prize to an institution, there is no reason to do so in this case.

The great global literary archives duel for the manuscripts of the most renowned authors

Since the Nobel Prize in Literature is generally not awarded posthumously, the award to the Nietzsche Archive should ultimately also serve to give Friedrich Nietzsche the internationally renowned award, at least indirectly. And who would have deserved such an honor more than an author whose most casual scribbles were collected in his own archive and carefully preserved during his lifetime?

Today, 100 years later, the situation appears reversed: whoever receives an important international award such as the Nobel Prize in Literature receives an offer from a renowned literary archive in no time at all. In the field of literature, the connection between international pricing and archiving practice has become remarkably close in recent decades. The major global literary archives at Harvard, Stanford, Yale and the University of Texas are in competition for the manuscripts of the most renowned authors. Located in Austin, Texas, the Harry Ransom Center houses the extensive legacy of Nobel Prize winners in literature, JM Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro. There is also a long list of other Nobel Prize winners for literature, such as Doris Lessing, Gabriel García Márquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Samuel Beckett and Ernest Hemingway.

Even if the Harry Ransom Center tries to keep the purchase amounts of the bequests and estates under wraps, the amounts leak out again and again: A million and a half dollars are said to have been paid for Coetzee a few years after the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2003; the estate of Gabriel García Márquez, who was also honored in Stockholm in 1982, is said to have migrated to the southern United States for around two million dollars.

The Texas archive can pay top prices because it is supported by wealthy private sponsors

Due to the willingness of wealthy Texans to spend large sums of their oil wealth on writers’ scattered papers, the American proverb “Nothing is certain in this world but death and taxes” has been adapted for the estate business: There is now nothing for highly decorated writers as certain as death and the subsequent sale of the estate to the Harry Ransom Center: “Death and Texas”. The Texas archive is often able to pay top prices because it is not financed solely from tax revenue, but is also supported by wealthy private sponsors.

Open detailed view

There have not always been such large amounts involved. Since the 1950s, North American archives and libraries have turned to buying the manuscripts of modern writers because they were cheap. At that time, old manuscripts and books could only be found for large sums of money – if at all, because most of the attractive objects had long been in European inventories at that time. In the field of Anglo-American literature, half a fortune has to be spent on manuscripts by living authors, because an international market for legacies has meanwhile established itself. Fueled by the enormous interest in the archival material of contemporary authors, globally active literary agents like Andrew Wiley are now also taking care of the marketing of bequests and estates and are using the fierce competition between the large American libraries and archives to drive up prices.

The celebration of the fugitive is typical of estate management, and shopping lists or laundry lists are also archived

For the archives, the high investments in acquiring manuscripts by contemporary authors remain speculative. It is by no means clear how the reputation of authors is to be determined and whether the reputation of writers who are popular today will continue to exist tomorrow. In order to mitigate the uncertainty of their own actions, the archives also base their evaluation on cultural awards such as the Nobel Prize in Literature or leading national literary prizes: these are considered indicators of the posthumous assertiveness of the authors who have been awarded the prize. If Martin Walser had already received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the amount due for his legacy would certainly have been even higher.

However, since the prizes alone do not guarantee the long-term reputation of the authors, the archives themselves have to make great efforts to preserve the value of their costly investments: the estates are elaborately indexed and presented in exhibitions, which often also include items of clothing in addition to manuscripts and writing utensils and show furnishings. A celebration of the fugitive, typical of estate affairs, takes place: shopping lists or laundry lists are also intended to provide information about the author’s work. A close connection between everyday life and artistic work is thus suggested, which is then examined by literary scholars. Since this high effort can only be made for a few authors, the inheritance system tends to reinforce existing inequalities in the cultural attention economy.

When Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche launched the Nietzsche Archive, her brother could hardly be contacted. Today, writers are often in excellent health and still have a good part of their creative career ahead of them when the major literary archives are trying to get their manuscripts and shopping lists. The subject of the negotiations is then no longer just the material already accumulated, but also what is still to be written. Literary archives today not only collect the past, but place bets on the future.