Beiwerk als Werk

Abstract

Abstract After Love Letters by Christopher Strachey in 1954, Stochastische Texte by the mathematician Theo Lutz in 1959 were the first successful attempt in the world to create a literary text through a computer. In 2019, Lutz’s archive was acquired by the German Literature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach). It includes a large number of previously undiscovered and unpublished items which made possible the attempt to reconstruct the generation of the text in a number of steps. Lutz’s experiment was inspired by the philosopher Max Bense, whose work was assisted by a young student, Rul Gunzenhäuser, who would himself later prove to be a pioneer in informatics. It took its starting point from words extracted from the novel Das Schloss by Franz Kafka. Lutz subsequently wrote a computer program in order to generate a randomly assembled text on a Zuse Z 22 machine. In a final step, the text was then poetically revised by the author.