Karl Barth was an incredibly productive writer for more than 50 years. During his lifetime, he published more than 600 writings, including a 13-volume, 9,300-pages, yet unfinished work on Christian doctrine titled Church Dogmatics. Additionally, he wrote numerous unpublished papers such as sermons, lectures, manuscripts, letters, and other items. After Barth’s death in 1968, it became clear that it was necessary to undertake a Collected Edition (“Gesamtausgabe”) of his works.
The objective of the Collected Edition is to provide historical introductions and clarify the manifold theological, philosophical, historical, political, autobiographical, and literary allusions of Barth’s writing. It also explains—not least of all—distinctive Swiss German words and phrases for readers outside Switzerland. The editorial process includes the following:
I: collect and order texts, some of which had been long out of print or were first published in hard-to-find volumes, according to their literary genres
II: add the unpublished texts from Barth’s literary estate
III: make Barth’s writings, given their particular historical context and their complexity of expression, accessible to contemporary readers.
The publication of the Collected Edition is managed by the director of the Karl Barth-Archiv (currently Peter Zocher), who also serves as editor-in-chief. Numerous well-known theologians, including Eberhard Busch, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Eberhard Jüngel, and Gerhard Sauter, have supported the editorial work.
The editors of the Collected Edition aim to provide the information necessary to make Barth’s language as accessible as it would have been to contemporaries hearing his talks and lectures in person. Frequently, the first step in preparing the edition is the painstaking process of deciphering Barth’s difficult handwriting, itself an indispensable contribution to Barth scholarship, which takes place in the Karl Barth-Archiv.
Since its inception in 1971, fifty-six volumes have been published in six series. The volumes represent either newly reissued critical editions of texts published by Barth (for example, The Epistle to the Romans of 1919 and The Christian Dogmatics of 1927) or previously unpublished texts with particular significance for the interpretation of Barth’s intellectual development made available for the first time (as with The Göttingen Lectures on Dogmatics of 1923–1925). They are organized as follows:
I: Sermons
II: Academic Works
III: Lectures and Shorter Articles
IV: Conversations
V: Letters
VI: From Karl Barth’s Life
Significant goals guide the future of the Collected Edition; above all, the publication of the lectures and shorter articles from the 1930s and 1940s, which document among other matters Barth‘s struggle against the influence of National Socialism on the Protestant Church and his subsequent concern for Christian responsibility during the Second World War. Another goal is the publication of previously unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, which still raise fruitful questions for the Church and theology and point the way toward new answers.
Since 2022, the Karl Barth-Archiv launched a digital edition of the Karl Barth Collected Works in which the latest volumes and, successively, older volumes are freely accessible. Patrons can also access all papers from the archive.
For a full outline of all volumes published to date in the Collected Works along with English translation information, click here to download a pdf outline.