About manuskripte

manuskripte

manuskripte is a literary magazine published in Graz, Styria. It was founded in 1960 by Alfred Kolleritsch, on the occasion of the opening of Forum Stadtpark, and is published quarterly by the manuskripte Literaturverein. It publishes exclusively first publications — Erstveröffentlichungen — of German-language and international literature, with poetry, prose and essays in balance. Today it is edited by Andreas Unterweger, who became co-editor in September 2016 and sole editor after Kolleritsch's death in 2020. In the 1960s and 1970s manuskripte was a scandal medium of the Austrian avant-garde, giving early or first publication to Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, Wolfgang Bauer, Barbara Frischmuth, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker and Oswald Wiener, among others. It was relaunched in spring 2021 under the subtitle weiter schreiben, keep writing, and the associated manuskripte Prize of the Province of Styria has been awarded since 1981.

Scholars describe manuskripte as one of the most important literary journals nationally and internationally, and Kolleritsch himself is described in biographical sources as editor of Austria's most influential literary magazine. For a quarterly from Graz, outside the Viennese and German publishing capitals, that standing rests on sixty years of editorial continuity and on the generation of writers — the Graz Group — whose earliest work appeared in its pages.

Foundation in 1960 at Forum Stadtpark

manuskripte was founded in 1960 on the occasion of the opening of Forum Stadtpark in Graz. The Franz Nabl Institute for Literary Research at the University of Graz, which holds the magazine's editorial archive, records that the journal was closely associated with Alfred Kolleritsch, born in 1931 and died in 2020, who initially published the magazine together with Günter Waldorf, who lived from 1924 to 2012. Kolleritsch had been a founder member of Forum Stadtpark in 1959 and later became its president in 1968. In 1995 the magazine was separated from Forum Stadtpark and the manuskripte Literaturverein, the manuskripte Literature Association, was founded as its publisher. The magazine has always been based in Graz.

Kolleritsch's own formation shaped the journal. He was born in Brunnsee in Styria, studied history, German and philosophy at the University of Graz, presented a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in 1964, and taught at a Graz grammar school from 1964 to 1993, alongside his editing, his presidency of Forum Stadtpark and his founding membership of the Graz Authors' Association in 1973. He was himself a poet and novelist. A literary magazine edited for six decades by a working writer and teacher, from within a self-built cultural centre, is a different institution from a publisher's list product, and manuskripte's history follows from that personal editorship.

First publications only

The magazine's content consists of German-language and international literature, with poetry, prose and essays holding the balance, and it publishes exclusively first publications. That rule, recorded in the German-language Wikipedia entry and the batch record, is the journal's editorial signature: a text appearing in manuskripte has not appeared before. For established authors that makes the journal a place of premieres; for unknown authors, a place of discovery, because a first publication in manuskripte can also be the author's first publication anywhere. The archive's description confirms the early pattern: initially three, then four issues per year, almost exclusively featuring first publications.

Frequency today is quarterly, four issues a year, published by the manuskripte Literaturverein. The magazine's official website is manuskripte.at. No circulation figure for manuskripte was given in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is invented here: literary quarterlies live by reputation, subsidy and subscriber loyalty more than by audited sales, and manuskripte's documented reputation — prize, archive, scholarly literature — is the measurable part of its standing.

The Graz Group and the avant-garde laboratory

manuskripte documented the evolution of Austrian avant-garde literature and art from 1960 onward, in the summary of a scholarly article on the journal and the Graz Group. Influenced by the pioneering work of the Vienna Group and developing with the rich scenes around Forum Stadtpark, the journal soon became the primary Austrian outlet for experimental writing, providing crucial support to young, innovative writers who were often treated with hostile condescension by an Austrian literary establishment intolerant of formally experimental writing in the post-war decades. While the first issue mostly featured poetry, later issues turned noticeably to prose — specifically to experimental short prose operating as a laboratory for experimentation with language, syntax and form.

The Graz Group associated with the magazine consisted, in the reference entry's list, of Wolfgang Bauer, Barbara Frischmuth, Peter Handke, Gunter Falk, Klaus Hoffer, Max Gad and Alfred Kolleritsch himself. The batch record's wider list of writers given early or first publication in the scandal years — Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, Bauer, Frischmuth, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker and Oswald Wiener — reaches beyond the Graz core to the Viennese avant-garde as well. The scholarly article names Friedrich Achleitner, Handke, Frischmuth, Gert Jonke and Falk as writers whose experimental short prose it traces in the journal's pages. Play, performance and provocation belonged to the method: raucous public readings punctuated by performance art, beer and heckling are part of the documented Graz style of the period, under philosophies the scholars summarise as happy art and attitude.

Scandal medium of the 1960s and 1970s

The batch record calls manuskripte, in the 1960s and 1970s, a scandal medium, and the scholarly record supports the substance of that label in cooler language: a journal challenging the conventions not only of literary form but of literary culture, against a conservative literary landscape in Graz and a hostile establishment. A University of Graz research project on Graz and manuskripte frames the story as one of institutionalisation: an avant-garde and subculture organ founded with Forum Stadtpark against that conservative landscape, connected to the founding of the steirischer herbst avant-garde festival in 1968 and its literary symposia, and leading to the founding of the Graz Authors' Assembly, the GAV, in 1973.

Two of the journal's early authors later received the Nobel Prize in Literature: Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek both appear in its author lists. That fact is recorded here without inflation — many journals publish future laureates young — but combined with the presence of Jandl, Mayröcker and Wiener, it establishes that manuskripte's first-publication policy captured, at the start of their careers, a remarkable share of the Austrian writers who would define the following half-century. The journal's author roll in its reference entry runs to dozens of further significant names in German-language literature, from Herta Müller and Robert Menasse to Gerhard Roth, Werner Schwab and Urs Widmer.

The editorial archive and scholarly record

The manuskripte editorial archive, covering 1960 to 2015, is held as a permanent loan from the Styrian Provincial Library at the Franz Nabl Institute and comprises 364 folders in total. Its contents include materials on individual issues, typescripts and manuscripts of contributions received, galley proofs with and without handwritten corrections, computer printouts, emails, copies and carbon copies, ongoing correspondence from 1960 to 2015 including rejection letters, internal editorial information and detailed subscriber documentation. Individual issues from number 4/5 onward and the years 1962 to 2015 are documented in detail, with gaps the archive description notes honestly.

An archive of that completeness makes manuskripte unusually researchable among literary magazines: scholars can reconstruct what was submitted, rejected, corrected and printed, and a current University of Graz project is examining, from the editorial archive and Kolleritsch's private notebooks, the conditions that made an avant-garde literary movement in Graz after 1945 possible between the founding of Forum Stadtpark and manuskripte in 1959/1960 and the founding phase of the GAV in 1974. The magazine is thus both a living quarterly and a documented historical source, a dual status few periodicals achieve.

Prizes: Styria, Graz and the Rotahorn

Three prizes are associated with the magazine. The manuskripte-Preis des Landes Steiermark, the manuskripte Prize of the Province of Styria, has been awarded every two years since 1981 — the batch record's statement that the prize has been awarded since 1981 is confirmed, with the two-year rhythm specified in the journal's reference entry. The manuskripte-Literaturförderungspreis der Stadt Graz, the City of Graz's manuskripte literature promotion prize, has been awarded annually since 1980 by a specialist jury appointed by the magazine's editor, to authors with a demonstrated Graz connection for a work in progress; it was called the Forum Stadtpark literature promotion prize until 1997 and has been endowed with 2,500 euros since 2019. Since 2011, the Rotahorn literature prize has been awarded annually in cooperation with manuskripte.

The prize lists double as a map of Graz literature: the city prize's recipients include Werner Schwab in 1990, Peter Waterhouse in 1986, Andrea Stift in 2005 and Andreas Unterweger himself in 2007, nine years before he became the magazine's co-editor. The Styria prize's recipients include Reinhard P. Gruber in 1995. Prizes attached to a journal extend its first-publication mission into direct patronage, rewarding works in progress by writers of the journal's own region and circle.

Succession: Unterweger and weiter schreiben

Andreas Unterweger, born in 1978 in Graz, a writer, editor, translator and songwriter who studied German and French in Graz and Nantes, became co-editor of manuskripte in September 2016. After the death of founder Alfred Kolleritsch on 29 May 2020, Unterweger became the magazine's sole editor. A Graz literary history confirms that the magazine continues after Kolleritsch's death in 2020 under Unterweger's direction.

In spring 2021 manuskripte was relaunched under the subtitle weiter schreiben. The reference entry explains the phrase's reinterpretation: a piece of advice Kolleritsch liked to give young authors — keep writing — newly understood in the sense of thinking further or broadening horizons. The relaunch subtitle thus performs the succession in miniature: the founder's counsel retained as the title's motto, its meaning widened by the successor. For a journal whose identity had been one man's editorship for sixty years, that managed transition — four years of co-editorship before the founder's death, then a relaunch under his own phrase — is the institutional fact that allowed manuskripte to survive its founder, as Der Soldat in the same batch did not survive its ministry.

manuskripte in Graz's literary ecology

Graz has been called a city of literary magazines, and manuskripte is the senior title in a local ecology that also includes Lichtungen, edited after Markus Jaroschka's era by Andrea Stift-Laube, and the feuilleton magazine Schreibkraft, alongside the wall newspaper ausreisser and publishers such as Droschl and Leykam. A Graz literary survey calls the city Austrian literature's secret or uncanny capital, a phrase coined by Reinhard P. Gruber, himself a manuskripte prize winner and Kolleritsch collaborator. Within that ecology manuskripte holds the avant-garde's founding charter: Forum Stadtpark, the steirischer herbst festival and the GAV all belong to the institutional world the magazine helped create.

Nationally, reference surveys of Austrian literature list manuskripte among the country's most traditional and important literary magazines, in Graz company with Sterz and Schreibkraft and Lichtungen. Its distinct contribution is the combination of longevity, first-publication exclusivity and avant-garde pedigree under continuous editorship — a profile no Viennese competitor matches in the same form.

manuskripte today

manuskripte continues to appear quarterly from Graz under Andreas Unterweger, published by the manuskripte Literaturverein, publishing exclusively first publications of poetry, prose and essays, carrying the subtitle weiter schreiben since its spring 2021 relaunch, and associated with the Styria prize awarded since 1981, the Graz promotion prize awarded since 1980 and the Rotahorn prize awarded since 2011. Its official website is manuskripte.at. The verified essentials — 1960 foundation by Alfred Kolleritsch with Günter Waldorf at Forum Stadtpark, the Graz Group and scandal years, the Nobel laureates among its early authors, the 364-folder editorial archive, the 1995 separation into its own Literaturverein and the 2016 to 2020 succession — define a magazine whose history is, unusually, as well documented as its literature. This profile has added nothing to that record that the sources do not support.