About Bühne

Bühne

Bühne is Austria's largest theatre and culture magazine, a German-language monthly-style title published in Vienna that has accompanied Austrian stage life, with interruptions and reinventions, for more than a century. First published on 6 November 1924 as Die Bühne, it began life as a strikingly modern illustrated magazine for theatre, literature, film, fashion, art, society and sport, and over the decades it narrowed into a specialist companion for theatregoers: a richly illustrated guide to productions at Austria's leading stages, filled with previews, background reports, interviews and photography. Since 1982 it has appeared under the shortened title Bühne. Its publisher history is a tour through Austrian media history itself, from the Kronos and Vernay publishing houses of the interwar years, through the Wiener Bühnenverein and the Verlagsgruppe News, to a relaunch under Red Bull Media House in 2020 and a move to the Falstaff publishing house in autumn 2025.

Few Austrian magazines can claim a comparable span. Bühne is at once a contemporary service magazine for audiences planning their theatre visits, a trade journal for the performing-arts world, and a historical source: the digitised interwar issues, preserved by the Austrian National Library in its ANNO portal, are still studied by scholars of Viennese modernism. Its print ISSN is 0007-3075, its editorial home is Vienna, and its current editor-in-chief is Atha Athanasiadis. It appears ten times a year. This profile sets out what is verifiably known about the magazine; where the published record is thin, above all on its mid-twentieth-century decades and on current audited circulation, that is stated openly rather than filled in with invention.

Origins: Die Bühne in 1924

The first issue of Die Bühne appeared on 6 November 1924 in Vienna. It was published by the Kronos-Verlag and was connected with Die Stunde, the boulevard newspaper published by the Hungarian-born press entrepreneur Imre Békessy. The new magazine carried the expansive subtitle Zeitung für Theater, Literatur, Film, Mode, Kunst, Gesellschaft und Sport — a newspaper for theatre, literature, film, fashion, art, society and sport — and that breadth was programmatic. In its first issue the editors declared, in a motto later quoted by scholars, that for them "stage" meant everything that has an audience. Theatre stood at the centre, but the magazine deliberately placed high culture and popular culture side by side in a non-hierarchical mix, in the manner of a revue.

The magazine was modern in design and close to its public in tone. It campaigned offensively against the growing antisemitism of the period, published photographs of dancers and lightly dressed chorus girls that were daring for their time, and at the same time reported in detail on the Wiener Frauenakademie and on exhibitions of women's art. Its first editor-in-chief was Hans Liebstöckl, who was followed by Josef C. Wirth. Among its contributors were Fred Heller, Gretl Müller, who headed the fashion desk, and the illustrators Liesl Weil and Erni Kniepert. In the famous Viennese quarrel between the architect Adolf Loos and the Wiener Werkstätte, the magazine took the side of the Werkstätte. The title page of the first issue, showing the actress Iphigenie Buchmann-Castiglioni as Cleopatra, survives in the Austrian National Library's digital collections and gives a vivid sense of the magazine's glamorous, illustrated character.

Growth, Takeover and the Road to 1938

In 1926, when the Kronos publishing company was taken over, Die Bühne became part of the Vernay publishing house, one of the significant Viennese magazine publishers of the era. The magazine appeared weekly in this period, and by the time of the Anschluss, Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany in March 1938, a total of 468 issues had been published. That number alone testifies to the magazine's established place in Viennese cultural life: through the late Habsburg afterglow, the First Republic and the authoritarian Ständestaat, Die Bühne chronicled the city's stages, its film world, its fashion and its society, week after week.

The magazine's interwar run is today an important primary source. Academic work on Viennese culture between the wars draws on Die Bühne for its coverage of performers, fashion and popular entertainment, and a 2023–24 intervention at Vienna's Theatermuseum, the "Walk of Fame" publication on Austrian cultural personalities from 1900 to 1938, was explicitly modelled on the magazine's style. That scholarly afterlife is part of the title's significance: Bühne is not only a magazine about theatre history, it is itself a document of theatre and media history.

Aryanisation, Wiener Bühne and Closure in 1943

The Anschluss ended the magazine's first era abruptly. In March 1938 the publication was subjected to "Aryanisation", the Nazi expropriation of Jewish-owned or Jewish-associated media. Raimund Haintz was installed as editor-in-chief, soon followed by Theo L. Goerlitz. Under National Socialist rule the magazine continued under the name Wiener Bühne. Authors such as Franz Nabl and Erhard Buschbeck published in its pages during this period. Like many Austrian periodicals, it did not survive the war economy: publication was discontinued in 1943 for reasons connected with the war. The title that had defined Viennese theatre journalism for almost two decades disappeared from the newsstands, and its interwar world — the revues, the fashion desks, the society pages — disappeared with it.

The Post-War Revival and the Bühnenverein Era

The post-war history of the title is documented more sparsely than its interwar fame, and the details that follow are those recorded in library catalogues and reference works. Catalogue records held by the HathiTrust digital library list a post-war series of Die Bühne published in Vienna by Verlag Austria International from 1958, and German reference lists of film and theatre periodicals likewise date the magazine's monthly post-war existence from 1958. The revival thus came a decade and a half after the wartime closure, in the Austria of the State Treaty and reopened federal theatres, when the Burgtheater, the Vienna State Opera and the country's stages were rebuilding their audiences.

By the early 1980s the publisher of record was the Wiener Bühnenverein, the Viennese stage association, and it was under the association's stewardship that the magazine took its modern form and its modern name: since 1982 it has been titled simply Bühne, with a surviving catalogue description based on issue number 283 of April 1982 showing the shortened cover title. For decades thereafter, until 2020, the magazine was published by the Wiener Bühnenverein together with the VGN Medien Holding, the Verlagsgruppe News group. In that long era Bühne settled into the role it still broadly occupies: the house magazine of Austrian theatre, distributed in close combination with theatre subscriptions, and edited for the people who actually fill the seats.

Relaunches: Red Bull Media House and the Move to Falstaff

In 2020 the magazine changed hands and was relaunched. Red Bull Media House took Bühne over from the Verlagsgruppe News, and the first issue of the new Bühne appeared at the end of August 2020 under the slogan "Hier spielt das Leben" — "Life plays here". Der Standard reported the relaunch at the time, with Atha Athanasiadis, a journalist whose career had taken him through the founding circle of News, the editorship of TV-Media and the launch editorship of The Red Bulletin, as editor-in-chief. The first relaunched issue was printed in a run reported at 65,000 copies, a figure that signalled the new owner's ambition for the title.

The most recent change came in autumn 2025, when the BÜHNE magazine moved to the Falstaff publishing house; the current imprint lists the publisher as Bühne c/o Falstaff Verlags-Gesellschaft m.b.H., with the Wiener Bühnenverein still named as the magazine's Herausgeber, its sponsoring publisher, in reference listings. Athanasiadis remained editor-in-chief across the move. Reference listings for the current magazine name Klaus Peter Vollmann and Sarah-Anna Wetzlmayr as deputy editors, Kerstin White as picture editor, Maximilian Kamper as art director and Bernadette Sarman as responsible for digital matters, with Angelika Hager, Julya Rabinowich and Christopher Wurmdobler as regular columnists in every issue. That continuity of the senior editorial team through two changes of publishing house underlines that Bühne is treated by its owners as a standing cultural institution rather than a disposable title.

What Bühne Publishes

Bühne covers theatre and music theatre above all: drama, opera and musical productions, festivals, and — in smaller measure — the visual arts and film. Its reporting concentrates on the leading Austrian stages, among them the Vienna State Opera, the Burgtheater, the Akademietheater, the Theater in der Josefstadt, the Theater der Jugend, the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien musical theatres, the Landestheater Niederösterreich and the Landestheater Linz. Geographically the centre of gravity lies in Vienna, Lower Austria and Upper Austria, while major cultural dates and festivals in the other federal states are also taken into account. The Wiener Festwochen and the Salzburg Festival receive regular, extensive coverage, and since January 2008 international theatre and opera events have also been covered, in that case in the form of reviews. At the same time the subject range was broadened to include jazz and film and a single focus theme in each issue.

The typical contents of an issue are previews of forthcoming productions, background information about works, composers, playwrights and ensembles, interviews with performers and directors, and a great deal of photography. Production stills and portraits are central to the magazine's appeal: Bühne is a visual magazine in a way that text-led German theatre journals such as Theater heute are not, and its picture-led format descends directly from the illustrated revue style of the 1924 original. Coverage extends from the great federal stages to smaller houses and the independent scene; the magazine's online edition in October 2026, for example, carried pieces on the Volkstheater, the Kosmos Theater, the Theater am Werk and the free theatre scene alongside the Burgtheater and the Josefstadt.

A Preview Magazine, Not a Review Magazine

The most distinctive feature of Bühne's editorial character — and the one most often remarked on in descriptions of the magazine — is what it traditionally does not do. For its core Austrian coverage, the magazine has historically carried previews, background and interviews, but no reviews and no post-performance reporting on the productions it presents. International events, added in 2008, are the stated exception. This is a deliberate positioning. Bühne understands itself as a companion that leads audiences toward the stage: it introduces what is coming, explains who is involved and shows what a production looks like, rather than judging it after the premiere. In a media landscape in which the feuilletons of the daily newspapers and specialist online platforms supply the critical verdicts, Bühne occupies the complementary niche of the informed, enthusiastic guide.

That positioning is inseparable from the magazine's distribution model, discussed below, under which a large share of copies reaches readers in combination with theatre subscriptions. A magazine that arrives as part of a theatre's relationship with its subscribers cannot easily also be that theatre's harshest critic, and Bühne has been described as an early example of relationship marketing in the cultural sector. Yet the description usually adds the important qualification that, despite this closeness, the editorial quality is high enough that Bühne simultaneously performs the function of a trade journal for Austrian theatre. Its interviews and background pieces are written by specialists — the current team includes experienced theatre journalists — and its columnists give each issue a voice beyond pure service information.

Frequency, Circulation and Distribution

Bühne currently appears ten times a year; in the VGN era it was described as appearing eleven times a year, at the end of each month. It is sold by subscription and at kiosks and tobacconists — the Austrian Trafiken — and, crucially, in combination with theatre subscriptions, a channel that has historically delivered the unusually high circulation for a cultural magazine claimed in its media data. Figures must be handled with care and dated honestly: the VGN-era media data cited in reference works gave a print run and sold circulation of around 54,500 copies, and the first issue of the 2020 Red Bull relaunch was reported with a print run of 65,000 copies. No current, independently audited circulation figure for the Falstaff era could be verified for this profile, and readers should treat the older figures as historical reference points rather than as a statement of the magazine's present reach.

Audience and Relationship with the Theatres

The magazine's readers are, by design, theatre's own audience: subscribers to the Vienna State Opera, the Burgtheater and the other big houses, together with the broader culturally engaged public that buys the magazine at the kiosk or takes a direct subscription. Because copies travel with theatre subscriptions, Bühne reaches precisely the readers whom Austrian stages most want to address, at the moment when they are planning their visits. That makes the magazine commercially significant to theatres, festivals and advertisers in the cultural sector far beyond what its niche subject might suggest, and it explains why the title has been worth relaunching and rehoming by successive owners — an association of theatres, a news-magazine group, an energy-drink media house and a gourmet publisher have each, in turn, seen strategic value in owning Austria's theatre magazine.

For the theatres themselves, Bühne functions as a shared platform. No single Austrian stage, not even the Burgtheater, could sustain a glossy national magazine of its own; together, through the Bühnenverein tradition and the magazine's wide stage coverage, they share one. Its pages give smaller houses — a Landestheater premiere, a Theater der Jugend season launch, an independent production — national visibility alongside the Vienna State Opera, and its festival coverage connects the summer peaks of Salzburg and the Wiener Festwochen with the year-round subscription season.

Bühne Online and the Digital Archive

The magazine's digital home is its website at buehne-magazin.com, which publishes news and features between print issues, covers premieres and season announcements, and invites readers to subscribe to a newsletter under the "Hier spielt das Leben" slogan; under the Falstaff ownership the site runs on the publisher's digital infrastructure, and its articles are bylined by the same editorial team as the print magazine, including Athanasiadis, Vollmann and Wetzlmayr. The website extends the print magazine's preview logic into a running news service for the theatre season.

Bühne's other digital life is its past. The interwar issues of Die Bühne have been digitised by the Austrian National Library and are freely accessible through its ANNO newspaper and magazine portal, which is why the 1924–1938 magazine remains a living research source a century after its founding — students and scholars read the original fashion pages, dance photographs and theatre coverage online today. Few Austrian magazines offer so complete a bridge between a digitised historical archive and a continuing print present.

Cultural Significance

Bühne matters for three reasons. First, longevity: founded in 1924, suppressed and renamed under National Socialism, closed in 1943, revived in the post-war decades and relaunched twice in the twenty-first century, it is a century-old thread through Austrian cultural life, and reference works describe it straightforwardly as the largest Austrian theatre and culture magazine. Second, function: its preview-led, picture-rich, subscription-linked model made it the connective tissue between Austria's stages and their audiences, a role no newspaper feuilleton and no single theatre's programme book could play. Third, documentation: between the ANNO archive of its interwar years and its continuing coverage of every major Austrian stage, Bühne constitutes a running visual and journalistic record of how Austria has performed — and watched — theatre, opera and musicals across a hundred years. In a country whose identity is unusually bound up with its stages, the magazine of those stages holds a significance larger than its page count.