The Kölner Ausgabe der Werke Heinrich Bölls, a major interdisciplinary and established corporate project, is unique in Germany both for its scope and for bringing together an international team of editors, backed by a number of agencies and institutions. The critical edition will comprise Böll’s entire literary oeuvre as well as essays, speeches, radio plays and other programmes, film scripts and selected interviews. Particular features are its adherence to a strict chronology regardless of genre and its inclusion of hitherto unpublished material, redefining what constitutes a publication in the multi-media age and re-evaluating traditional editorial practices. The Kölner Ausgabe der Werke Heinrich Bölls is a decentralized, multi-institutional collaborative endeavour, to which I contributed in 2003-2004 at the University of Leeds.
