A look into the archive: What estates reveal about authors. Just as diverse as authors are their archives. They tell stories of the work on the text as well as the realities of life, shedding new light on the authors and their works. Ulrich von Bülow unfolds a brief theory of the estate and dedicates 15 studies to individual author archives of the 20th century. Each study focuses on specific documents, with their materiality illustrated through numerous images. The range of interpretations spans from the relationship between orality and literacy in Martin Heidegger to the function of notebooks for Peter Handke, and even to the question of how Rilke spent the winter of 1911/1912 in Duino and which letter he read before writing the first lines of the Duino Elegies. Among the authors discussed are Tankred Dorst.