(2) Reading traces: Reader psychology, text comprehension research, and literary politology

Reading traces have always been one of the key fields of interest at the DLA. They can be found in various places in the archive: in authors‘ libraries, correspondence, and in museums, where visitors read the exhibits as well as look at them. We aim to look more closely at the traces of reading in our holdings by applying approaches borrowed from reader psychology and text comprehension research, which we are developing further in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media Tübingen. Visitors to the exhibition »Kafkas Echo« can put on VR glasses and dive into the ›Manuscript Universe‹ of Kafka’s novel The Trial - or think about Kafka’s style by examining a selection of sources taken from original texts by Kafka and from AI-generated ›Kafka-texts‹ and answering the question: Is this by Kafka or not? Or they can compare their interpretation of The Trial with the interpretation of other readers by using the interactive station to see how others have read and reacted to the text.

The two political lines – ›Activism and Research‹ and ›Asylum for Archives‹ –, which were launched in 2022, will be continued in 2025. Through its programme »Securing the Free Word«, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), the DLA seeks to make a substantial contribution to safeguarding the free word and strengthening free speech, by acquiring relevant collections and objects for the archive and making them available to the public for discussion. The combined approach of acquisition, access, and communication aims to secure threatened and hitherto insufficiently recognized thought and writing and simultaneously to demonstrate the relevance of the holdings in the social debate. The programme follows three main aspects: (1) exile, (2) the transformation of the public sphere, and (3) gender justice. 

The symposium »Maikäfer flieg!« (6–8.05.2025), in cooperation with the Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Bielefeld, the University of Cologne, the University of Education Ludwigsburg, and the University of Stuttgart, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, marks the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day by exploring 8 May 1945 as a conceptual figure in literature.