About DUM – Das Ultimative Magazin

DUM – Das Ultimative Magazin

DUM – Das Ultimative Magazin, the name being an acronym of Das Ultimative Magazin, the ultimate magazine, is a literary magazine from Langenlois in Lower Austria. It has been published since 1992 and appears four times a year. Each issue is built around a theme set by the editors, to which anyone may submit a contribution for consideration; each issue publishes prose and poetry, carries an interview and book reviews; and once a year one issue is explicitly announced and published as a dialect issue, a Dialektausgabe, devoted to writing in Austrian dialect. Its documented circulation is about 1,000 copies. The magazine also runs regular readings and celebrations in Lower Austria and Vienna, and its editorial home in Langenlois — a wine town in the Kamptal — makes it one of the clearest examples in Austria of a literary magazine rooted in a small town rather than a capital or university city.

The editors recorded for DUM are Wolfgang Kühn, who is also its publisher, together with Kathrin Kuna and Markus Köhle as editors-in-chief in reference listings; the magazine was founded in 1992 by Wolfgang Kühn and Erich Engelbrecht, according to the batch record. Its website is dum.at, where current issues, interviews and its reading events are presented, and its bibliographic record is held in the German journal database under ZDB number 2052308-7. Behind the playful, self-mocking grandeur of its name — the ultimate magazine, from a town of a few thousand people — stands a serious and durable literary undertaking: by its tenth anniversary in 2002 to 2003 it had already published some 300 authors from ten countries, and it has continued quarterly publication ever since.

A local project of 50 copies: the founding in 1992

The best-documented account of DUM's beginnings comes from the Lower Austrian provincial government's press release for the magazine's tenth anniversary, when issue 24 had just appeared. DUM began, the province recorded, as a local project with a first print run of 50 copies produced by self-photocopying — im Selbstkopierverfahren, run off on a copier by its makers. From that photocopied start the Lower Austrian literary magazine steadily changed its appearance and grew to a circulation of 1,000 copies. By the tenth anniversary, around 300 authors from ten different countries had been published in it, from newcomers with their first publications to established authors such as Gerhard Jaschke and Radek Knapp.

The anniversary arithmetic in that release is itself informative: in ten years the magazine had produced 40 issues in total, 24 of them since the formal foundation of its association in 1996. DUM's organisational history therefore has two dates, both documented: the project's start in 1992, from which the magazine dates its foundation, and the 1996 constitution of the association — DUM, ein Kunst- und Kulturverein, an art and culture association — that has carried it since. That two-step beginning, informal project first and association second, is the classic Austrian pattern, visible also at Schreibkraft, which moved from a Forum Stadtpark department to its own association a year after foundation.

The themed issue and the open submission

DUM's editorial mechanism is documented with unusual clarity and is central to its character. Every issue stands under a particular theme, which is set by the editorial team. Anyone may submit a contribution on that theme; the editors read the submissions and publish those they select. An issue therefore assembles, under one heading, prose — short stories among it — and poetry by writers who may never have met, chosen from an open field rather than commissioned from a closed circle. Alongside the themed texts, every issue contains an interview and book reviews, giving each number a consistent architecture: theme, interview, reviews.

That architecture makes DUM a genuinely open door in Austrian literature. The great association magazines tend to work substantially by invitation and editorial network — necessarily, given their standing — but DUM's documented model is the theme call: a writer anywhere, including a first-time writer, can answer it. The tenth-anniversary record of 300 published authors from ten countries, explicitly spanning newcomers at their first publication and established names, is the measurable result of that openness over the magazine's first decade. For the Lower Austrian scene in particular, DUM has functioned as a first rung: a real, printed, quarterly literary magazine, edited in the region, to which a new writer in the Waldviertel or Weinviertel could actually submit work with a prospect of print.

The annual dialect issue

Once a year, DUM publishes an issue explicitly designated as a dialect edition. That annual Dialektausgabe is a documented and distinctive feature: Austrian dialect literature — writing in the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of the country — has a long and serious tradition, from dialect poetry to the works of the Vienna Group and H. C. Artmann's dialect poems, but it is often treated as a marginal or folkloric category by literary institutions. A quarterly literary magazine that reserves one of its four annual issues, every year, for dialect writing gives that tradition a regular, respected place in contemporary print.

The dialect issue also fits the magazine's home ground. Langenlois and the surrounding Kamptal and Waldviertel are regions where dialect remains a living spoken medium, and a magazine edited there that honoured dialect writing annually was connecting its literary programme to the language actually spoken around it. In the Bavarian-language Wikipedia, DUM's entry is written entirely in the eastern Austrian dialect — a small, telling sign that the magazine's dialect commitment is recognised as part of its identity. Together, the theme system and the dialect issue define DUM's editorial personality: hospitable, regionally rooted, and formally plural, willing to print the standard-language short story and the dialect poem under the same cover.

Readings, festivals and the magazine beyond print

DUM regularly organises readings and festivities — Lesungen und Festln, in the documented phrase — in Lower Austria and in Vienna. The live dimension is not incidental to a magazine of this kind: readings are where a small-circulation quarterly meets its public face to face, recruits subscribers and contributors, and turns a postal community of readers into a local literary scene. The magazine also maintains a documented presence at the Unabhängiges Literaturhaus NÖ, the independent literature house of Lower Austria in Krems, where the title holds readings — placing DUM inside the province's official literary infrastructure as well as its informal one.

The tenth-anniversary record credits the magazine's first decade with more than its issues: readings and festival participations, among them co-founding a cultural festival of literature and wine — a pairing natural to the Kamptal wine country — two participations in the Tolstoy festival at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia, Tolstoy's estate, and the publication of a story volume, in the Edition DUM context, involving three authors. An international festival appearance at Yasnaya Polyana by a photocopied-born magazine from Langenlois is a striking datum: it shows the editors using the magazine as a passport, carrying Lower Austrian writing into European literary exchange and bringing contacts back. The current dum.at site continues the live tradition, listing readings and events in Langenlois, including co-operation with partners such as the literature house and film programmes — evidence, in the magazine's fourth decade, of an institution still actively convening its public.

People: Kühn, Engelbrecht, Kuna and Köhle

The batch record names Wolfgang Kühn and Erich Engelbrecht as DUM's founders in 1992, and reference listings name Wolfgang Kühn as the magazine's publisher and a member of its editorial leadership across its history. Continuity of that kind — a founder still publishing the magazine more than thirty years on — is the single most common factor in the survival of Austrian literary magazines, from Alfred Kolleritsch at manuskripte to the Ernst and Fleischanderl partnership at Kolik. Current reference listings give the editorial leadership as Wolfgang Kühn with Kathrin Kuna and Markus Köhle. Köhle is a well-known Austrian author and a prominent figure in the Austrian poetry-slam and performance scene, and his presence on the masthead connects the magazine to the spoken-word generation as the dialect issue connects it to the dialect tradition.

Provincial records add the administrative footprint: Lower Austrian cultural funding listings show support for the DUM association's annual programme from Zöbing, a Langenlois district, confirming both the magazine's continuing activity and its standing in the province's cultural budget. The editorial address recorded at the tenth anniversary — Walterstrasse in Langenlois, with orders and submissions directed to the magazine there — captures the reality of such an enterprise: a national literary quarterly run from a street address in a small wine town, by named individuals whom contributors and readers could actually reach.

Circulation, frequency and the economics of 1,000 copies

DUM appears four times a year with a circulation of about 1,000 copies — a figure documented both in reference listings and, as the endpoint of its growth from 50 photocopied copies, in the provincial anniversary release. Four issues a year at 1,000 copies is, by the standards of Austrian literary magazines, a viable middle scale: larger than Schreibkraft's roughly 500 semiannual copies, comparable to Lichtungen's roughly 1,100 quarterly sale, and far below the late Sterz's 8,000. It is a scale sustained, characteristically, by a mixture of subscriptions and single sales, association labour, and public cultural funding from the province whose literary life the magazine serves.

Quarterly frequency matters editorially, not just economically. Four theme calls a year means four open doors a year for submitting writers, and a rhythm of deadlines that keeps a small editorial team and its contributor community in continuous contact. The dialect issue occupies one of those four slots annually, so the magazine's year has a reliable shape: three themed issues in the standard literary language and one dialect issue, each with its interview and reviews. Readers and contributors can plan around that shape, and have done so since 2003, the year from which the batch record dates the magazine's quarterly rhythm in its settled form.

DUM among Austrian literary magazines

General accounts of Austrian literature name DUM as the Lower Austrian representative among the country's traditional and important literary magazines — Manuskripte, Sterz, Schreibkraft and Lichtungen in Graz, Literatur und Kritik and Erostepost in Salzburg, Wespennest and Kolik in Vienna, Cognac & Biskotten in Innsbruck, and DUM in Lower Austria. Within that company DUM is distinguished by three things: its small-town base, since Langenlois is by far the smallest place of publication in the group; its open theme-submission model, the most formally democratic editorial mechanism among the established titles; and its annual dialect issue, a commitment none of the others makes in the same regular form.

It is also distinguished by longevity honestly earned. A magazine begun on a photocopier in 1992, in a literary landscape littered with titles that lasted three issues, has now appeared for well over three decades and more than 120 issues. Its history refutes the assumption that literary institutions need a capital city, a university or a large publisher to survive: they need, on the evidence of DUM, a theme, a deadline, an editor who stays, a province that funds culture outside its capital, and a thousand readers.

The record and its limits

The documented core of DUM's story is secure: foundation in Langenlois in 1992 by Wolfgang Kühn and Erich Engelbrecht; a first run of 50 self-copied copies growing to 1,000; an association formally constituted in 1996; 40 issues by the tenth anniversary, 24 of them since 1996, with about 300 authors from ten countries; quarterly themed issues with prose, poetry, an interview and reviews; an annual dialect issue; readings in Lower Austria and Vienna and at the literature house in Krems; festival work including Yasnaya Polyana; editorship of Kühn with Kathrin Kuna and Markus Köhle; and the website dum.at. This profile has added nothing beyond those documented facts and their verifiable context.

The limits should be noted as plainly: summary sources do not provide a complete list of DUM's issue themes across three decades, audited circulation figures for individual years, or a full masthead history, and none is asserted here. What stands is the portrait of a magazine whose joke name conceals a serious achievement — Das Ultimative Magazin, run from Langenlois since 1992, keeping an open, themed, dialect-honouring door into Austrian literature for any writer willing to answer its call.