Hanns Eisler 
Complete Edition

 

Edited by the Internationale Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft in cooperation with Stephanie Eisler and the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin

Before 1989

The Hanns Eisler Archive was established in 1963 at the German Academy of the Arts in former East Berlin. Its purpose was to provide a scholarly setting wherein all of Hanns Eisler’s manuscripts could be collected, researched and prepared for publication. Nathan Notowicz was the first to oversee the archive and was the initiator of Hanns Eisler’s Collected Works (EGW). He edited the volume containing the New German Folk Songs (series1, volume 18), which was published in 1968. His successor, Manfred Grabs, further developed the concept of a thoroughgoing and scholarly collected works edition, which is documented in his Hanns Eisler – Oeuvre and Edition. Grabs carried on the EGW and continued to collect and catalogue primary and secondary source materials. In his book, Hanns Eisler: Compositions – Writings – Literature (Leipzig 1984), he documented all primary sources and secondary literature known at the time. Grabs and his successor, Eberhardt Klemm, oversaw the publication of three more music volumes and also five volumes of writings.

After 1989

Following the events of 1989 and the death of Eberhardt Klemm in 1991, the research section of the Academy of the Arts of the GDR, which accommodated the Hanns Eisler Archive, was dismantled. The federal state of Berlin acquired the archive’s holdings and lent them to the newly founded Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste. However, the previous position of archive and edition manager no longer existed, and the EGW was rendered defunct. The International Hanns Eisler Society was then founded on May 21, 1994 in order to proceed with the publication of a new collected works edition. This was the initiative of Stefanie Eisler, the composer’s widow, and musicologist Albrecht Dümling, whom she had entrusted with the task of reorganizing the new edition. Wolfgang Hufschmidt was voted President of the Society. In accord with Eisler’s heirs, the Society closed a contract in 1998 with Breitkopf & Härtel to publish the composer’s works.

Hanns Eisler’s Collected Works (HEGA) is an interdisciplinary project that involves editing Eisler’s compositions and writings according to the most current standards of literary and musicological philological practice. About fifty volumes in nine to ten music series and one series of writings are planned. The music series are overseen by Prof. Christian Martin Schmidt of the Technical University in Berlin, and the writings series is overseen by Prof. Gert Mattenklott of the Free University in Berlin. The edition brings together branches of Eisler scholarship that had been formally divided between East and West. Moreover, scholars of various generations are working together on the edition in a productive exchange of experience and perspective.

Work on the new edition commenced when the International Hanns Eisler Society received support from the Deutsche Klassenlotterie and the Peter Klöckner foundations, which funded the editing of twelve volumes. Since 1998, the staff have been provided an office at the Free University in Berlin’s Department of Philosophy and Sociology. Along with the principal editors, Prof. Christian Martin Schmidt and Prof. Gert Mattenklott, musicologists Thomas Ahrend and Tobias Faßhauer and the literary scholar Friederike Wißmann work for the edition in editorial positions. These three positions are funded through the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is sponsoring the edition as a long-term project.