Kelli D. Barbour and Dr. Robert B. McFarland, Germanic and Slavic Languages

While there are many well-known German-speaking/writing male authors and high availability to their texts, the same does not follow for German-speaking/writing women. Scholarships access to texts by women, especially at the beginning of and before the twentieth century, is minimal. Seeing the need in the scholarly community to make texts available for reading and analyzing, I proposed to digitalize and analyze texts by the Viennese Journalist, Hermine Cloeter, who began writing in 1907.

The project, though not completed, gets closer everyday. Most of the articles have been typed and are only waiting editing before they will be published. The topics of these articles range from important historical figures in Vienna (Franz.v Defreggers), to the life experience and depiction of Vienna’s cab drivers, to the importance of art, to the beauty of the area surrounding Vienna. Each offers a unique aspect of what the city or country was like at the time and how individual figure, both great and small, influence the workings and course of a city. Looking beyond the articles to the Cloeter’s books, including Häuser und Menschen aus dem alten Wien, I made an amazing discovery that will not only aid the Sophie Project, but also adds an interesting dimension to further research—Cloeter used many of her feuilletons to create her books. Each book has a unique collection of feuilletons from any year before the book was published, and organized how Cloeter saw best. Digitization of Cloeter’s work will be much more expeditious, seeing as we will not have to retype the book chapters that appear as articles or vice versa. Häuser und Menschen is still in the process of being typed. Editing and glossing will occur almost simultaneously after the task of typing finished. Publishing on the Sophie website will occur immediately thereafter.

Unfortunately, the project ran into a little bit of a snag that we, through the Sophie Project, are working to solve. Changes in the copyright laws have made some of the material possibly ineligible to publish on the internet, we are working right now on obtaining permission from the Neue Freie Presse, which will then allow us to publish the articles published later than 1923. The only other major obstacle in the project was computer failure that effected the amount of material I was able to digitize.

Through the support of ORCA and its generous benefactors, I took the opportunity to go beyond the limitations of resources available in the United States. In a two-week research trip to Vienna, I worked with the Oesterreichische National Bibliothek as well as the Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaft to obtain copies of feuilletons we either did not know about or just to which we did not have access. Working the die Akademie der Wissenschaft was especially rewarding as they not only had Cloeter’s feuilletons, but a collection of her journals, letters, personal effects, and other unpublished material, including selections of stories written under her pseudonym, Justine Lot. The materials I was able to collect will be used both for my master’s thesis research as well as for the Sophie project as further publications. Besides working in these scholarly institutions, I also had the opportunity to interview the niece of Hermine Cloeter and talk with Cloeter’s great-nephew for a short while about who Cloeter was a person, how she wrote her feuilletons and books, and what her motivations for writing were.

Based on the research that took place over the last year, I had the opportunity to present a paper on a selection of works from Hermine Cloeter. The presentation and subsequent paper publishing took place last March at a conference hosted by the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, which last year focused specifically on the city and how it is portrayed in film, literature, and art. I focused specifically on what Cloeter was emphasizing in her portrayal of Vienna and what this emphasis accomplished. The basic thesis of my presentation entitled “Much Ado About Vienna: Cloeter’s Portrayal of Vienna as seen in ‘Einer aus dem musikalischen Wien‘ and ‘Wiener Hausmusik’” is that Cloeter, through her feuilleton articles of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, portrays her city as a mixture of the past and present and uses music, people, and streets to bridge between the two time periods. By so doing, Cloeter creates a hybrid perspective of Vienna that fuses a new Vienna with the glory of Vienna’s past. A modified version of this presentation/paper will be published in the Sophie Project journal within the next several months.

There is much analysis left to be done of Cloeter’s works, especially with the new material I brought back from Vienna. In order to increase the analysis then, we must first digitize the material and make it available to scholars throughout the nation and international community. Many scholars of different disciplines—historians, art historians, experts on Austrian culture, German scholars, and so forth—will be able to analyze was has heretofore been unknown and/or unavailable. As for the specific goals of this project, there remain several chapters and a few articles left to digitize, which will occur of the next few months. On a greater scale, awareness of the goals and resources of the Sophie Project needs to increase. I believe that we can do this in the future through mentioning the project to other scholars at conferences and in papers. With the greater availability of texts, as well as, greater awareness and usage of Sophie’s resources, I expect that this project will be a valuable to tool to scholars and universities throughout the world in understanding the female experience in the world and in analyzing masterpieces of literature from those who have been long ignored.

This project has been a great opportunity for me to learn various aspects of research in the Humanities. Digitizing the feuilletons and book of Hermine Cloeter has developed greater abilities of high-quality library, internet, and archival research, while analyzing Cloeter’s feuilletons has expanded my knowledge and understanding of the flanuer genre (writings of the city). As the project moves forward toward completion, I am sure that I will not be the only one to gain or have gained skills and understanding from the writings of Hermine Cloeter and other female authors like her.