DROSTE DIGITAL
Manuscripts - Spaces - Installations

For the first time, an exhibition makes the digitised manuscripts of the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff accessible. At Hülshoff Castle, the poet's birthplace, you can experience the cosmos of her microscopic manuscripts. You can discover six new rooms in the castle. To bring the manuscripts into the present, we have invited writers and artist collectives to work with the text images and to design individual rooms.

The selected manuscripts belong to the Meersburg estate, which, with 1500 pages of text, comprises about two thirds of the writer's entire estate. This outstanding cultural treasure consists of very different types of texts, for example fair copies of and drafts of poems, collections of motifs, letters as well as notes, receipts and lists. The estate belongs to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, is administered by the Berlin State Library and has been comprehensively digitised for the first time by the LWL Archive Office for Westphalia. These digital copies form the basis for the exhibition Droste Digital.

You can find the digital copies in the holdings of the Westphalian Literature Archive with the number 1064 / Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (Meersburg estate) under this link: archive.nrw.de/archivsuche

In the documentary Digitizing Droste. Zu Besuch im LWL-Archivamt für Westfalen [Visiting the LWL Archive Office for Westphalia], we follow the process of the Droste manuscripts in the Archive Office together with Katharina Tiemann from the LWL Archive Office: from restoration to digitisation to indexing.

The author Dorothee Elmiger deals with the collection of motifs for Die Judenbuche and designs Drostes' father's study. The writer and poet Nora Gomringer deals with the early work Bertha oder die Alpen and transforms Drostes' children's and youth room. Almut Pape and Emese Bodolay from the artists' collective Anna Kpok have joined forces with the musician Laura Eggert to develop a walk-in landscape from the poetry cycle Klänge aus dem Orient [Sounds from the Orient], which is part of Droste's entire Oriental cosmos. The international artists' collective Hyphen-Labs (Ece Tankal and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge) is looking at the relationship between nature and culture in the former bathroom, based on the poem cycle Die Elemente [The Elements].

» […] Fühlst du das Herz in dir, nicht heiß
Doch ehrlich, uns entgegen schlagen,
Dein Wort kein falsch und trügend Gleis,
Befleckend was die Lippen tragen, […]«

— from »Ungastlich oder nicht?« by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

Two further rooms introduce the topic of digitised manuscripts, including the process of digitisation itself, but also how the pages filled up during Droste's writing process. An app accompanies the exhibition and expands on the historical rooms. You can download the app right here in the App Store or in the Google Play Store and explore the rooms from home.

The exhibition Droste Digital is an in-house production of Burg Hülshoff – Center for Literature and is funded by the LWL Cultural Foundation and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in the program »Digitalisierung in Kultur und Medien«.

In cooperation with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the LWL Literature Commission for Westphalia, the LWL Archive Office, the Literaturmuseum der Moderne – Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Burg Vischering and the cultural estate Haus Nottbeck.

Presented by Westfälische Nachrichten and kultur.west.