About Perspektive

Perspektive

Perspektive — written in lower case, perspektive, in the magazine's own house style — is a Graz literary magazine that has appeared continuously since 1977. That continuity is itself remarkable: founded the same year as the Graz cultural magazine Sterz, Perspektive outlived it, surviving the transition from a school literary paper to a student project, through a turbulent decade of competing concepts in the 1980s, and into a second life from the early 1990s as a serious, professionally run journal with a distinctive and demanding programme. Since that takeover, Perspektive has defined itself by its engagement with the avant-garde paradigms of modernism and by a critical, even combative, attention to the literary field itself — to how literature is produced, published, reviewed and valued in Austria and the German-speaking world.

The magazine is published in Graz by the Literaturgruppe Perspektive, the Perspective literary group, and its website is perspektive.at. Its recorded print ISSN is 1021-9242. Among Austrian literary magazines it occupies the position of the theorist and the provocateur: where other titles in Graz and elsewhere primarily present new writing, Perspektive presents new writing while arguing, in its essays, interventions and editorial practice, about what writing should be and about what the literary business does to it. Scholars of German-language literature have noticed: the literary scholar Paul Pechmann is quoted in reference accounts calling Perspektive a singular magazine in German-language literature, whose editors aim at distinction both from the mainstream of the literary business and from advanced sub-discourses such as so-called experimental literature.

From school paper in Bad Ischl to Graz journal, 1977 to 1982

Perspektive was founded in 1977 by Alfred Ledersteger in Bad Ischl, in Upper Austria, as a Schülerliteraturzeitung — a school literary newspaper. That humble origin is documented and important: the magazine did not begin as an institutionally backed journal but as a school project by a young editor who then carried it with him. When Ledersteger went on to study chemistry, the editorial office moved with him to Graz. There, with the Graz co-editors Edi Falk, Petra Ganglbauer and Gerald Ganglbauer, the magazine produced its first professionally designed, printed and stapled issues, numbers 8 to 10, in 1982.

That bibliographic detail — issues 8 to 10 of 1982 as the first professional print production — marks the magazine's transformation. Its self-description changed with its form: from a literary newspaper of young authors it became Hefte für junge, zeitgenössische Literatur, notebooks or issues for young, contemporary literature. The move from Bad Ischl to Graz also moved the magazine into one of the most concentrated literary environments in the German-speaking world, the city of manuskripte and the Forum Stadtpark, of the steirischer herbst festival and the Graz authors' assembly. In Graz, a young literary magazine could find printers, readers, argumentative peers and rivals within walking distance — and Perspektive, by all accounts, used all of them.

The 1980s: as many concepts as editors

The documented characterisation of Perspektive in the 1980s is unusually vivid for a magazine history. The student newspaper became a project that, in the reference account's phrase, at first had as many concepts as it had editors: forty concepts within ten issues. Texts by and about the Graz squatter scene stood next to dedication postcards from Erich Fried, the eminent émigré poet. At times the spirit of feminist liberation theories blew through an issue; at other times a pacifist tone dominated. The magazine was, in other words, a mirror of the Graz alternative and student milieu of the decade — heterogeneous, political in shifting registers, and editorially unsettled.

That heterogeneity is worth recording without embarrassment, because it explains the sharpness of the turn that followed. Many little magazines live and die in exactly that condition, dissolving when their founding circle disperses. Perspektive instead underwent a deliberate refoundation from within: a new editorial team took over, discarded the miscellaneous line, and gave the magazine a programme strict enough to sustain it for the following three decades. The 1980s thus stand in its history as both a genuine first life — Fried's postcards and the squatter-scene texts are part of the record of Graz counterculture — and as the background against which the magazine's later identity was defined by contrast.

The early-1990s takeover and the avant-garde programme

At the beginning of the 1990s the Perspektive editorial team was taken over by Ralf B. Korte, Helmut Schranz, Robert Steinle and Sylvia Egger. The documented consequence was a departure from the previous heterogeneous magazine line: Perspektive became a serious and professionally conducted literary magazine. From that point on, the reference record states, the journal has engaged explicitly with the avant-garde paradigms of modernism and has focused on the literary field in a manner critical of the literary business itself — betriebskritisch, in the German term, critical of the Betrieb, the going operation of literature.

Two commitments are packed into that description, and both still define the magazine. The first is aesthetic and historical: an engagement with the classical avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes, not as museum pieces but as paradigms to be worked with contemporaneously. The magazine's own programmatic formulation, quoted in reference accounts, insists that it concerns itself with the avant-garde theme in a contemporary way and is neither a museum keeper for the historical avant-garde nor a lifeguard — the German plays on Bay Watch, coastal watch — for neo-avant-garde movements. The second commitment is sociological: to examine the literary field itself, its prizes, publishing structures, reviewing practices and orthodoxies, with the same critical energy that other magazines reserve for texts. Later editorial names recorded for the magazine include Korte together with Stefan Schmitzer and Julia Knaß among its editors, and Helmut Schranz's long association with the title is independently documented in Graz cultural reporting, which describes him as an author and co-editor representing a now-rare species of nonconformist in both writing and attitude to the literary business.

The Schloss Solitude intervention of 1999

The single most notorious episode in Perspektive's history is securely documented. In February 1999, at the Akademie Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart, a symposium titled Avantgarde — auslöschen oder verbessern? — avant-garde: extinguish or improve? — had been convened by the editor and literary scholar Thomas Eder. During the symposium, the Shelter Performance Group stormed the podium with toy pistols, replicas of the Parabellum, read out a manifesto and distributed leaflets. The action was an intervention associated with Perspektive, and reference accounts name it among the magazine's most sensational actions, aufsehenerregendsten Aktionen.

The episode is more than an anecdote, because it enacted the magazine's programme in public. A symposium debating whether the avant-garde should be extinguished or improved was answered not with a paper but with a staged avant-garde gesture — an armed, manifestly theatrical storming of the podium with toy weapons, a manifesto and leaflets, the classic media of the historical avant-gardes. Whether one reads it as homage, satire or critique, the intervention demonstrated that Perspektive's engagement with avant-garde paradigms was not purely textual. It also fixed the magazine's reputation in German literary studies: discussions of the post-war and contemporary avant-garde in German-language literature cite the Solitude intervention as a reference point, which is one reason a Graz magazine of modest material scale appears in scholarly accounts at all.

Contents and contributors

The content of Perspektive consists predominantly of German-language literature, developed, in the magazine's self-understanding, from a concept of literature fed by the classical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes. In practice that means prose, poetry and essayistic or hybrid texts that test form — writing in the lineage that runs from the historical avant-gardes through the Vienna Group and concrete poetry to contemporary experimental practice — together with the theoretical and field-critical reflection that accompanies it. The magazine is a natural home for authors whose work sits uneasily in commercial publishing: texts that are too formally radical, too short, too essayistic or too argumentative for a trade list find in Perspektive both publication and a context that takes their premises seriously.

The documented contributor list bears that out. Writers recorded as publishing or having published in Perspektive include Wolfgang Bauer, Franzobel, Erich Fried, Petra Ganglbauer, Friederike Mayröcker, Kathrin Röggla, Gerhild Steinbuch and Sophie Reyer, alongside a large cohort of the German-language experimental scene: Crauss, D. Holland-Moritz, Christine Huber, Ilse Kilic, Margret Kreidl, Florian Neuner, Kai Pohl, Ronald Pohl, Evelyn Schalk, Stefan Schmitzer, Helmut Schranz, Dieter Sperl, Enno Stahl, Ulf Stolterfoht and Mikael Vogel, among many others named in the reference record. The presence of Mayröcker — a central figure of Austrian post-war poetry — and of Bauer, the Graz dramatist, alongside younger experimental writers, shows the magazine's span: it connects the Graz avant-garde tradition of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary continuation.

Perspektive in the Graz literary ecosystem

Graz's literary density is the necessary background to Perspektive's story. The magazine manuskripte was founded there in 1960 and became the organ of the Graz avant-garde; the Forum Stadtpark provided its physical and organisational home; the Grazer Autorinnen Autorenversammlung, founded in 1973, organised its writers. Perspektive, arriving as a school paper from Bad Ischl and professionalising in Graz in 1982, entered an ecosystem that already had a senior avant-garde institution — and its later betriebskritisch stance, its critical focus on the literary field, can be read as the stance of a second-generation avant-garde magazine toward a scene that included its own elders and institutions.

Within the present-day Graz group, the division of labour is clear enough. Lichtungen is international and art-conscious, Schreibkraft is the feuilleton, manuskripte publishes first publications exclusively, and Perspektive is the magazine of avant-garde theory and practice and of critique of the literary business. For a writer or reader in Graz, the titles complement rather than duplicate one another. For literary history, Perspektive's continuous run since 1977 makes it one of the longest-lived German-language avant-garde magazines, a fact underlined by scholarly attention unusual for a journal of its size.

How the magazine is organised

Perspektive is published by the Literaturgruppe Perspektive, a literary group rather than a commercial house, and edited collectively in the Austrian little-magazine tradition. Reference listings name the group as publisher and record editors including Ralf B. Korte, Stefan Schmitzer and Julia Knaß. Its web presence is perspektive.at, and its print ISSN is 1021-9242. Like its Austrian peers, it operates at the small scale typical of literary journals: the summary sources used for this profile do not publish a verified circulation figure for Perspektive, and rather than estimate one, this profile records the absence — a common situation for avant-garde journals, whose significance is measured in scholarly citation, in the careers of their contributors and in the debates they provoke rather than in audited sales.

That organisational form — a group, a programme, a long run — also explains the magazine's resilience. A commercial owner might have closed a title with Perspektive's profile many times over; a literary group whose members are themselves writers and scholars sustains it because the magazine is their instrument: the place where their concept of literature is argued into existence, issue by issue. The early-1990s refoundation is the clearest evidence: when the magazine's line dissolved into heterogeneity, its new editors did not wind it up but rebuilt it around a stricter idea, and that idea has carried it from the 1990s to the present.

Assessment and limits of the record

Perspektive's significance rests on three documented pillars: its continuous publication since 1977, a lifespan matched by very few German-language literary magazines; its programmatic identity since the early 1990s as a journal of avant-garde paradigms and critique of the literary field, recognised by scholars as singular; and its willingness to act on that programme in public, emblematically in the 1999 Schloss Solitude intervention. Its contributor record links the historical Graz avant-garde to contemporary experimental writing, and its history — school paper, chaotic student project, professional refoundation — is an unusually complete miniature of how literary magazines actually live.

The limits of the available record are the usual ones for a title of this kind, and they are stated here rather than filled with invention: summary sources do not provide a complete issue index, exact publication frequency changes across five decades, or verified circulation data, and individual issue contents beyond the documented episodes cannot be listed reliably without consulting the run itself. What stands is sufficient. Perspektive is a Graz literary magazine founded in Bad Ischl in 1977 by Alfred Ledersteger, professionalised in Graz in 1982, refounded in spirit in the early 1990s under Ralf B. Korte, Helmut Schranz, Robert Steinle and Sylvia Egger, and still appearing — a small magazine with an outsized argument about what literature, and the business around it, should be.