About the Project

Over the centuries, the poems of the ancient Greek poet Sappho have been widely praised, quoted and, like her person, creatively reimagined. Sappho is also indispensable to the history of German-language literature: more than 1,000 literary texts from the 15th to the 21st century testify to the productive literary reception of Sappho. These texts quote Sappho’s work, incorporate the author as a character, draw on biographical theories and legends about her, and span an intertextual network with other reception testimonies. At present, a strong increase in the literary reception of Sappho can be observed in the German-speaking world.

This website gathers information on the literary reception of Sappho in the German-speaking world. Behind it lies a dissertation project preceded by years of engagement with the reception of Sappho, which resulted, among other things, in an anthology on the literary reception of Sappho in the German-speaking world. Now the accumulated knowledge about the reception of Sappho is being combined with expertise in the field of Digital Humanities, making Sappho Digital an exemplary use case for a digital reception studies.

The data compiled here consist of four parts:

  • a human-readable, tabular catalogue of all known productive-literary reception testimonies of Sappho from the German-speaking world,
  • a formal ontology for the machine-readable modelling of detailed knowledge about literary reception histories,
  • a semantic graph holding this detailed knowledge about 99 sample reception testimonies and 165 Sappho fragments and their intertextual relationships, as well as
  • a controlled vocabulary for classifying recurring elements in the literary reception of Sappho.

This data is analysed and presented in various ways. An overview of all the components of the website can be found here. Notes on the exemplary analysis can be read here.

Full texts of the reception testimonies are never provided. A selection of texts can be found in the volume Sappho. Texte zur literarischen Rezeption im deutschsprachigen Raum (2023); links to digitized copies are provided in the catalogues. A select bibliography on the literary reception of Sappho can be found here.

Project Status

The website is currently (as of April 2026) published in a provisional state. The project is expected to be completed in 2027. Until then, the website will be continuously expanded.

Data

All data provided may be freely reused with attribution of the source (CC BY 4.0). All data is freely accessible via GitHub.

Suggested Citation

Laura Untner: Sappho Digital. Die literarische Sappho-Rezeption im deutschsprachigen Raum. Berlin/Wien 2024–[2027], https://sappho-digital.com.

To ensure better reproducibility, it is advisable to state the date of the data’s last update, given in the bottom line of the website.

About Me: Laura Untner

I am a doctoral candidate at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies and a research associate at Freie Universität Berlin, associated with the Cluster of Excellence »Temporal Communities. Doing Literature in a Global Perspective«. My dissertation project is supervised by Frank Fischer (FU Berlin), Anita Traninger (FU Berlin) and Paula Wojcik (University of Vienna). Together with Henny Sluyter-Gäthje (University of Potsdam), I coordinate the Early Career working group in the DHd association as well as the Network of Young Digital Humanities Berlin-Brandenburg; from April to June 2026 I was a visiting researcher at the Stanford Literary Lab; since June 2026 I have been a co-opted member of the board of the DHd association.

Alongside my academic work, I am active in the independent literary scene: as a board member of Unabhängige Lesereihen e. V. and as a member of the curatorial team of the Berlin reading series »Schreiben gegen die Norm(en)?«.

Previously, I studied German Philology and Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna and worked from December 2020 to September 2024 at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where I focused mainly on Karl Kraus (Rechtsakten der Kanzlei Oskar Samek, Dritte Walpurgisnacht) and Arthur Schnitzler (Briefwechsel mit Autorinnen und Autoren and various side projects). For many years I co-directed, on a voluntary basis together with Julius Handl, the Viennese literary reading series »Gläserne Texte«.

A list of my publications can be found on ORCID. Many full texts are also listed on ResearchGate. Project-related publications and talks are additionally listed here, press coverage, interviews and reviews here. If you have any questions, feel free to reach me at laura.untner@fu-berlin.de. You can also find me on Bluesky.

Contact

Do you know of a literary text from the German-speaking world that has to do with Sappho but is not listed here? I am very grateful for tips of any kind: laura.untner@fu-berlin.de.

Have you found a suggestion for improvement or even an error? I would be glad to hear about that too. The best way is to open an issue on GitHub right away.

Acknowledgements

For support with research, I am especially grateful to Julius Handl.

For feedback, exchange and support, I would also like to thank Peter Andorfer, Julia Jennifer Beine, Ingo Börner, Frank Fischer, Achim Hölter, Klaus Illmayer, Dimitra Grigoriou, Martin Anton Müller, Bernhard Oberreither, Gregor Pirgie, Lisa Poggel, Henny Sluyter-Gäthje, Amrei Stanzel, Anita Traninger and Paula Wojcik.

Funder

Funded by the City of Vienna Culture (MA 7 Wissenschaft)