About Kolik

Kolik

Kolik — in its own styling, kolik. zeitschrift für literatur, kolik, journal for literature — is an Austrian literary magazine founded in Vienna in 1997 by the writer Gustav Ernst and the translator and publicist Karin Fleischanderl. It is published in Vienna by the Verein für Neue Literatur, the Association for New Literature, and it appears quarterly. In the landscape of Austrian literary journals, Kolik holds a distinctive double position: it is a literary magazine of recognised seriousness, whose contributor list includes many of the central names of contemporary Austrian writing, and it is also, through its special issues KOLIK FILM, the literary magazine that reports to Austria's two great film festivals, the Viennale in Vienna and the Diagonale in Graz. Its recorded ISSN is 1560-6775, and its website is kolik.at.

The founding year, 1997, places Kolik a generation after the great Austrian magazine foundations of the 1960s and 1970s — manuskripte, Podium, SALZ, Sterz, Perspektive, Lichtungen — and one year before Schreibkraft in Graz. Kolik was thus founded by editors who already knew the Austrian magazine world from inside: Fleischanderl had spent a decade, from 1987 to 1997, as co-editor of the Viennese literary magazine Wespennest, and Ernst was an established writer and editor of books on Austrian literature and film. Kolik is best understood as a deliberate new beginning by two experienced editors who wanted a journal of their own design, and its documented history — more than 336 authors by 2016, special film issues, and a linked academy and prize — shows that design working over nearly three decades.

Founders: Gustav Ernst and Karin Fleischanderl

Gustav Ernst, born in Vienna in 1944, is an Austrian writer of prose and drama whose editorial work long predates Kolik. His documented editorships include a volume on literature in Austria with Klaus Wagenbach, books on screenwriting and on film drawn from his teaching, and a period as editor of Wespennest in 1989. Karin Fleischanderl, born in Steyr in 1960, trained as a translator of Italian and English at the interpreters' institute in Vienna and studied Romance philology; she has worked as a freelance translator since 1983 and is the German translator of the complete works of Antonio Tabucchi, as well as of books by Gabriele D'Annunzio, Gianrico Carofiglio, Natalia Ginzburg, Luigi Malerba, Dacia Maraini, Marcello Mastroianni, Melania Mazzucco and Pier Paolo Pasolini. From 1987 to 1997 she was co-editor of Wespennest.

That pairing — a writer-editor and a translator-editor with a decade of magazine experience behind her — explains much about Kolik's character. The writer brought a network among Austrian authors and an interest in film and theatre; the translator brought a professional's sense of language, an Italian and international horizon, and the discipline of someone who had already helped run a literary journal for ten years. In 2003 the two edited together a volume titled Zum Glück gibt's Österreich, and in 2005 they jointly founded the Leondinger Akademie für Literatur, an academy for literature in Leonding; in 2009 they founded the Johann Beer Literature Prize together. Kolik sits at the centre of that shared body of work: it was the first and remains the flagship of their joint institutions.

Verein für Neue Literatur and quarterly publication

Kolik is published in Vienna by the Verein für Neue Literatur, with Ernst and Fleischanderl recorded as its editors. The association form is the standard Austrian vehicle for literary magazines — Podium, Erostepost and SALZ are likewise association publications — and it suits Kolik's scale: a quarterly literary journal edited by its two founders, sustained by subscriptions, sales and the public cultural funding available to Austrian literary journals, and free of commercial pressure to chase a mass readership. Reference listings describe it, neutrally and accurately, as an Austrian literary journal with its place of publication in Vienna, appearing quarterly since 1997.

The magazine's physical and editorial consistency over that period is part of its identity. Surviving copies catalogued by antiquarian booksellers show a substantial paperback journal — individual issues run to roughly 140 to 165 pages — of new prose, scenes, poetry, essays and book discussion, a scale that allows an issue to function as a small anthology of the current Austrian literary moment. Issue contents documented in booksellers' listings show the typical Kolik mixture: new fiction and poetry by Austrian writers, dramatic scenes, texts in translation — including Serbo-Croatian and German parallel presentation — conversations with authors, and a reviews section in which critics including Thomas Rothschild and Sabine Scholl discussed new books. That mixture, maintained quarter by quarter, is what a literary magazine is for: a periodical cross-section of a literature as it is being written.

More than 336 authors: the contributor record

By 2016, more than 336 authors had published in Kolik. That figure, documented in reference accounts, is the magazine's own measure of its reach into the writing population of the German-language world, with the emphasis on Austria. The named contributors in the record include Friedrich Achleitner, Bettina Balàka, Helmut Eisendle, Antonio Fian, Elfriede Gerstl, Sandra Gugić, Reto Hänny, Walter Hinderer, Elfriede Jelinek, Alexander Kluge, Alfred Kolleritsch, Friederike Mayröcker, Judith Nika Pfeifer, Peter Rosei, Gerhard Rühm, Marion Steinfellner, Anna Weidenholzer, Herbert J. Wimmer, Gernot Wolfgruber and Dorothea Zeemann.

Read closely, that list maps the Austrian literary field across generations. Achleitner, Rühm and Mayröcker connect Kolik to the Vienna Group and the post-war avant-garde; Kolleritsch connects it to manuskripte and Graz; Jelinek, Gerstl, Rosei and Fian represent the established Austrian prose and theatre of the late twentieth century; Balàka, Gugić, Pfeifer and Weidenholzer represent the succeeding generation of Austrian women writers whose careers were formed in the 2000s and 2010s. A quarterly that can print the avant-garde's founders and the newest prose in the same volume is performing the central service of a national literary magazine: constructing, issue by issue, the canon of the present as a conversation between generations rather than a succession of them.

KOLIK FILM: the festival special issues

Kolik's most visible public feature beyond the literary world is KOLIK FILM. For the Austrian film festivals held each year — the Viennale in Vienna and the Diagonale, the festival of Austrian film, in Graz — special issues appear under the KOLIK FILM name. The connection is natural given Gustav Ernst's long engagement with film: he edited books on screenwriting, on authors' film and film authors, and on writing film criticism, and taught in the field. A literary magazine that sends a special issue to film festivals extends its brief from the written text to the authored film, treating Austrian cinema as part of the same cultural fabric as Austrian prose and poetry.

The festival issues also solve a practical problem of literary publishing: audience. A quarterly journal of new literature addresses a small, committed readership; a festival special issue meets the concentrated, culturally engaged public of the Viennale and the Diagonale at the moment of its greatest attention. Through KOLIK FILM, the magazine's name and contributors travel into the film world, and film writing travels back into the literary journal's orbit. Reference accounts treat the KOLIK FILM issues as an integral part of the magazine's identity rather than a side product, and any account of Kolik that omitted them would miss the feature by which many Austrians outside the literary scene know its name.

Around the magazine: academy, prize and literary education

Kolik's editors built institutions around the magazine that extend its work beyond the printed page. The Leondinger Akademie für Literatur, founded by Ernst and Fleischanderl in 2005, is an academy for literature in Leonding, Upper Austria, devoted to the teaching of literary writing; Fleischanderl also juried texts for the Leonding youth prize for language and photography, held a teaching assignment in literary criticism at the University of Klagenfurt in 2007, and served on the jury of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2009 and 2010 — the most visible literary competition in the German-language world. The Johann Beer Literature Prize, founded by the two editors in 2009, adds a prize to the structure.

This surrounding architecture distinguishes Kolik from magazines that exist only as periodicals. The editors' work forms a small system: a journal that publishes writers, an academy that trains them, a prize that honours them, and jury and teaching roles that connect the system to the national literary institutions. It is the same pattern visible at Podium, where the circle runs a magazine, readings and prizes — but in Kolik's case the system was built by two individuals within a single decade, which makes it a particularly clear example of editor-driven institution building in Austrian literature.

Kolik among the Austrian magazines of its generation

Kolik belongs to the youngest generation of Austria's established literary magazines. The senior titles — Literatur und Kritik from 1966, Podium from 1971, SALZ from 1975, manuskripte from 1960 — were founded in the post-war decades; the Graz group followed in 1977 to 1979; Kolik and Schreibkraft, both Viennese- and Graz-based foundations of 1997 and 1998, are the late arrivals that nonetheless achieved permanence. In the standard listing of current Austrian literary magazines, Kolik appears on the Vienna side of the ledger alongside Wespennest — the magazine from which its editors came — and its founding can be read as a succession within Viennese literary publishing: experience accumulated at Wespennest in the decade to 1997 was reinvested in a new title rather than lost.

Vienna, it is worth noting, supports several literary magazines at once, as Graz does, because each holds a different brief. Kolik's brief — new literature in substantial quarterly volumes, edited by a writer and a translator, with a formal bridge to film through KOLIK FILM — is distinct from Wespennest's essayistic internationalism and from the Graz titles' regional anchors. The Austrian system works because its magazines are not interchangeable: a writer with a film essay, a long prose text and a debut poem has three different natural homes, and Kolik is the home that joins literature to the festival cinema.

Reading Kolik today

For a reader approaching Kolik now, the practical facts are straightforward. It is a German-language literary quarterly from Vienna, edited by its founders Gustav Ernst and Karin Fleischanderl and published by the Verein für Neue Literatur, with new prose, poetry, dramatic texts, essays and reviews in each issue and the KOLIK FILM special issues appearing for the Viennale and the Diagonale. Its website is kolik.at, where the current issue and the magazine's activities are presented. A new reader who wants the measure of the magazine should do what its editors have always asked of readers: take a single issue whole, since the Kolik mixture — an established name beside a debut, a dramatic scene beside a translated text, a film special beside a quarterly of new writing — only shows its design at the scale of the complete number.

For a writer, Kolik represents a specific opportunity within the Austrian system: a quarterly edited by a working writer and a working translator, at the centre of a small institution that also teaches and awards prizes. Submission to such a magazine is never merely postal; it is an approach to editors whose taste is on public record across nearly three decades of issues, and whose contributor list — from the avant-garde elders to the newest Austrian prose — tells an intending contributor exactly what company a text would be keeping if it were accepted.

The record, its limits, and an assessment

The documented record for Kolik is solid on the essentials and should be reported exactly: founded in Vienna in 1997 by Gustav Ernst and Karin Fleischanderl; published by the Verein für Neue Literatur in Vienna; quarterly; editors Ernst and Fleischanderl; ISSN 1560-6775; website kolik.at; more than 336 contributing authors by 2016, with the named list above; and the KOLIK FILM special issues for the Viennale and the Diagonale. The batch record for this profile lists no website for Kolik, but the magazine's own site, kolik.at, is documented in reference sources — a small correction by verification, noted here for the record.

The limits are the familiar ones: summary sources give no verified circulation figure for Kolik, no complete issue index, and no systematic record of its funding, and this profile does not invent them. What the record does support is a clear assessment. Kolik is a founder-edited Viennese literary quarterly of nearly three decades' standing, with a contributor base that spans the Austrian avant-garde's elders and the present generation, a recognised festival presence through KOLIK FILM, and editors whose academy, prize and jury work have made the magazine the centre of a small but complete literary institution. In a country whose literature runs on magazines, Kolik is one of the load-bearing titles of its generation.