Edition
Schriften Caspar David Friedrichs und seines Dresdner Umfelds [Writings of Caspar David Friedrich and his Dresden Circle]

Launched in November 2020, this project is in the process of compiling a comprehensive, historical-critical, and annotated edition of Caspar David Friedrich’s writings and letters. It aims to create a reliable basis for the urgently needed reassessment of Friedrich’s writings by ensuring the following:

• a complete presentation of all known texts by Friedrich,
• the historical-critical edition of texts based on original sources where they are available, or otherwise on the most reliable textual evidence, and
• the extensive annotation of the texts, including identification of people, places, and artworks (especially in Friedrich’s Äußerungen bei Betrachtung einer Sammlung... [Remarks on Viewing a Collection] with its numerous brief discussions of anonymized paintings), as well as references to quotations and intertextual links.

The edition of Friedrich’s writings and letters will be supplemented by a fully annotated edition of all texts published as part of the so-called “Streit um Caspar David Friedrichs Tetschener Altar [Ramdohr Dispute over Friedrich’s Tetschen Altarpiece]” in the years of1809 and 1810. This heated debate about Friedrich’s oil painting, which was scathingly criticized by Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr’s, not only shaped Friedrich’s self-image profoundly but also influenced his perception by contemporaries. In this context, the edition will also make available Johann Jakob Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern’s treatise Gelegentliche Gedanken über das Wesen der Kunst in Bezug auf die Landschaftsmalerei [Occasional Thoughts on the Nature of Art in Relation to Landscape Painting].