About an.schläge

an.schläge

an.schläge is an Austrian feminist magazine published in Vienna in German by CheckArt, the Verein für feministische Medien und Politik — an association for feminist media and politics. Its full self-description is an.schläge, das feministische Magazin, the feminist magazine, and it has also been described as a feminist monthly. It was founded in 1983, suspended temporarily in the early 1990s, and revived in 1993, making it one of Austria's longest-running feminist periodicals. Public reference sources describe its present rhythm as seven issues a year, appearing monthly from February to July and from September to December, while other descriptions of the magazine have spoken of eight issues a year. That small discrepancy is worth stating openly, because the magazine's own publishing pattern has changed over four decades. What is not in dispute is its identity: a Vienna-based, association-published feminist magazine covering politics, work, culture and society from an explicitly feminist position, produced outside the large commercial magazine groups that dominate much of Austria's market.

Origins in the Austrian women's movement of the early 1980s

The magazine was founded in 1983 by the association Frauen Aktiv in Kultur- und Arbeitswelt, women active in the world of culture and work. Its founders are named in reference sources as Andrea Krakora and Ingrid Lengheim, today Ingrid Draxl. The year matters. In 1983 the Austrian women's movement was gathering strength, yet many of the legal milestones that are now taken for granted still lay ahead. A podcast marking forty years of the magazine in 2023 recalled that rape within marriage only became a criminal offence in Austria in 1989, and that Johanna Dohnal became Austria's first minister for women in 1990. an.schläge was therefore created not as a lifestyle title but as a movement publication, and its early home reflected that origin. In its first years the editorial operation was based at Vienna's autonomous women's centre, the Kommunikationszentrum für Frauen, Lesben, Migrantinnen und Mädchen, known as the FZ. That setting placed the magazine inside a self-managed feminist infrastructure rather than inside a commercial publishing house.

A name that is a deliberate wordplay

The title an.schläge is a pun, and reference sources explain its layers carefully. Anschlag in German can mean the strike of a typewriter key, the oldest form of public news posting — a notice pinned or pasted up in a public place — and an attack or assault. The magazine's name draws on all three associations at once: the typewriter keystroke of women writing, the public notice as the earliest form of transmitting news, and, pointedly, an attack on the patriarchy. The dotted styling of the name, an.schläge, makes that wordplay visible on the cover. For a magazine founded by women who intended to intervene in public debate rather than merely report on it, the name functioned as a programme in a single word. It signalled that the publication's journalism was itself a form of action, and that feminist writing belonged in public space. That reading of the title is the one given in encyclopaedic accounts of the magazine, and it remains central to how the title presents itself.

From a quarterly start to a monthly rhythm

The magazine did not begin at its later frequency. It first appeared four times a year, and from 1988 it appeared monthly. That move from quarterly to monthly publication in the late 1980s was a significant step for a small association magazine, because it required a more regular editorial operation, more contributors and a more reliable base of subscribers and supporters. Reference sources have described an.schläge as the only feminist monthly magazine in the German-speaking world appearing eight times a year, a claim that underlines how unusual sustained feminist periodical publishing has been in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The current reference listing gives seven issues a year, in a monthly pattern across two blocks of the year, February to July and September to December. Readers assessing the magazine today should therefore rely on the rhythm stated in its current publishing information rather than on older frequency claims, which reflect earlier phases of its history.

Suspension in 1991 and revival under CheckArt in 1993

The magazine's survival was not uninterrupted. In 1991 publication was temporarily suspended. Two years later, in 1993, the newly founded association CheckArt revived it, and CheckArt — formally CheckArt, Verein für feministische Medien und Politik — has remained its publisher and issuing body. That revival is an important part of the magazine's story, because it shows a pattern common to independent and movement media: a title can stop when money, energy or organisational support runs out, and can return when a new association takes responsibility for it. The revival also fixed the magazine's institutional form for the decades that followed. Rather than being owned by a commercial publisher, an.schläge continued as an association project, with the collective and organisational work of feminist media-making carried by CheckArt. Its print ISSN is recorded as 1993-3002, a bibliographic identifier that reflects its long-standing registration as a periodical. The gap of 1991 to 1993 should therefore be described accurately: the magazine was paused, not ended, and its post-1993 history is a second founding as much as a continuation.

What the magazine covers

an.schläge covers gender politics, culture and society, in the concise summary given in the batch research for this directory, and the fuller descriptions available elsewhere add politics, work and scholarship to that list. One office-community description characterised the magazine as a feminist magazine for politics, work, culture and science. In practice, a feminist monthly of this kind treats subjects that general magazines often approach from a different angle: equality law and its enforcement, violence against women, paid and unpaid work, care, education, cultural production by women, film, literature and art, and the politics of the body and of sexuality. The magazine's anniversary coverage in 2023 placed contemporary Austrian realities — a high rate of femicides and the low take-up of parental leave by men — alongside its founding history, which indicates the kind of agenda it continues to set for itself. Because detailed issue-by-issue contents are not comprehensively catalogued in public English-language sources, this profile describes the magazine's remit in the terms its own tradition and reference sources support, and does not invent specific features, interviews or campaigns that cannot be verified.

An association magazine in a commercial market

Austria's best-known magazines are mostly products of large groups — VGN, Styria, Mediaprint-linked publishers and Red Bull Media House among them. an.schläge is different in structure. It is published by a non-profit-style feminist association, CheckArt, and its history has been intertwined with Vienna's autonomous feminist institutions, from the FZ women's centre in its early years to a later office community at Frauenhetz alongside feminist education and anti-violence associations such as Efeu and Ninlil. That setting matters for understanding its journalism. An association magazine answers to its members, its supporters and its political purpose before it answers to advertisers, and its economics are correspondingly fragile, as the 1991 suspension showed. At the same time, that independence is the source of its longevity and credibility within its readership. Public sources do not provide a verified current circulation figure for an.schläge, and this profile does not estimate one. Small feminist periodicals in the German-speaking world have historically operated with modest print runs by commercial standards, but assigning the magazine a specific number without an audited source would be invention, and it is therefore left unstated.

The alerta platform co-operative and digital cooperation

In 2021 an.schläge was a co-founder of alerta, described in reference sources as a platform co-operative, Plattformgenossenschaft, which has since distributed an app of the same name bundling left-wing media offers. That step is significant because it shows the magazine adapting to a digital environment not by imitating large commercial portals, but by cooperating with other independent media. For small publications, shared digital infrastructure is one answer to the dominance of large platforms: readers can find several independent titles through one cooperative channel, and the titles retain their own editorial identities. The magazine also maintains its own website at anschlaege.at, and reference sources note a PDF download archive covering the years 2007 to 2010, with a register for the years 2000 to 2010. Those archival details are dated, and readers should check the magazine's current site for its present digital offer rather than assuming the archive described in older reference entries is complete. The direction of travel, however, is clear: an association print magazine that has added cooperative digital distribution to its print presence.

Forty years on: the anniversary perspective

In 2023 the magazine marked forty years since its founding, and the anniversary was covered in Austrian media discussion, including a podcast conversation with Brigitte Theissl, described there as a senior editor, leitende Redakteurin, of an.schläge, and as the founder in 2009 of the feminist blog Denkwerkstatt. That conversation treated the magazine's history as a lens on the wider history of feminism in Austria: the slow strengthening of the women's movement in the 1980s, the legal reforms that followed, and the distance still to travel. An anniversary of that kind is editorially useful for a small magazine, because it allows it to document its own archive and restate its purpose to a new generation of readers who may know feminist debate mainly through social media. It also underlines a simple fact: very few movement publications survive for four decades. an.schläge has done so through one suspension, one revival, and repeated changes in frequency and organisation, which makes its continuity itself a part of Austrian media history.

Place in Austria's magazine landscape

In the standard lists of Austrian magazines, an.schläge appears in the monthly, nationwide section, usually styled an.schläge, das feministische Magazin. Its neighbours in those lists are large commercial titles, which makes its presence instructive: the Austrian magazine market is not only the market of news weeklies, women's glossies and television guides, but also a field in which small, purpose-driven periodicals have held a place for decades. For researchers of Austrian media, an.schläge is a primary source for the concerns of the Austrian women's movement from 1983 onwards, because its pages recorded debates as they happened rather than in retrospect. For general readers, it offers a feminist reading of Austrian politics and culture that is distinct from both commercial women's magazines, which are organised around fashion, beauty and celebrity, and from academic journals, which address specialists. That middle position — journalistic, political and movement-rooted — is the magazine's defining characteristic, and it explains both its modest scale and its durability.

Reading an.schläge today, and the limits of the public record

Readers who want to follow an.schläge should start from its own current publishing information, because several facts about the magazine have changed over time and older reference entries preserve older states. Its frequency has been quarterly, monthly, eight times a year in some descriptions and seven times a year in its current reference listing. It has been published by two different associations across its life. Its digital offer has grown from a website and a partial PDF archive to participation in the alerta cooperative app. Public English-language coverage of the magazine is limited, and German-language reference coverage, while solid on founding, naming, frequency and revival, is thin on newsroom personnel beyond named editors in anniversary coverage, on current circulation and on detailed recent contents. This profile therefore states those limits openly rather than filling them with plausible detail. What can be said with confidence is substantial: founded in Vienna in 1983 by Andrea Krakora and Ingrid Lengheim for a women's cultural and labour association, named as a triple pun on writing, public notice and resistance to patriarchy, suspended in 1991, revived in 1993 by CheckArt, and still publishing in the 2020s, an.schläge is Austria's enduring feminist magazine.