About Schreibkraft

Schreibkraft

Schreibkraft — styled in lower case as schreibkraft by its publisher — is an Austrian culture magazine from Graz, Styria, published twice a year by edition schreibkraft, a Graz association for cultural work. It was founded in 1998 as a magazine for cultural feuilleton, the essayistic, reflective form of cultural journalism that occupies a cherished place in German-language publishing, and it has kept that character: each issue is built around a specific topic, filled principally with essays and feature articles chosen by its editors, and supplemented by narrative texts and book reviews that pay particular attention to books from small publishing houses. Its documented circulation is about 500 copies, which makes it, in material terms, one of the smallest titles in this group of Austrian magazines — and a clear example of how much of Austria's literary culture is carried by very small, association-run publications.

The magazine's setting is significant. Schreibkraft began in the Literaturreferat, the literature department, of the Forum Stadtpark in Graz — the very institution from which manuskripte and the Graz avant-garde had emerged four decades earlier. Graz accounts of the city's literary life list schreibkraft, described as a Feuilletonmagazin, among the established fixtures of the scene alongside manuskripte and Lichtungen. Its recorded print ISSN is 1606-7169 and its website is edition-schreibkraft.at. Because the published reference record on Schreibkraft is thinner than for its older Graz neighbours — its encyclopedia entry is short — this profile states plainly what is documented, builds its account on those documented facts and on the magazine's verified contributor record, and marks where the record runs out instead of filling gaps with invention.

Founded in the Forum Stadtpark in 1998

Schreibkraft was founded in 1998 by Werner Schandor, who was at the time the Literaturreferent — the officer responsible for literature — in the Forum Stadtpark in Graz. The magazine was set up, in the documented formulation, as a Zeitschrift für kulturelles Feuilleton, a journal for cultural feuilleton. That founding context matters twice over. Institutionally, the Forum Stadtpark is the historic home of Graz literary modernism: founded at the start of the 1960s, it gave the young Alfred Kolleritsch and his circle a base from which manuskripte reshaped Austrian literature. A new magazine born in its literature department in 1998 inherited both an address and an expectation — that Graz magazines are supposed to take literature seriously as a public, argumentative art.

Personally, the founding also set the magazine's editorial continuity. Werner Schandor, its founder, remains one of the five editors recorded for the magazine in reference accounts, alongside Hermann Götz, Robert Hutter, Hannes Luxbacher and Andreas R. Peternell. A founder who stays on the editorial board for the life of the magazine is a pattern familiar from Austrian little magazines — compare Alfred Kolleritsch at manuskripte — and it gives a twice-yearly title with a small circulation something more valuable than scale: memory, consistency of standard, and a stable sense of what the magazine is for.

From Forum department to edition schreibkraft

Since 1999 the magazine has been published by edition schreibkraft — in full, edition schreibkraft, Verein für Kulturarbeit, an association for cultural work based in Graz. The shift, one year after foundation, from a department of the Forum Stadtpark to an independent association publisher mirrors the biography of many Austrian cultural initiatives: incubated inside an established institution, then spun out into the association form that dominates Austrian independent publishing. Association publishing brings practical advantages — eligibility for public cultural funding, a legal personality owned by its members, and editorial governance by the people who make the magazine — and it also formalises the reality that a title like Schreibkraft is a collective cultural undertaking rather than a business.

The name of the publishing association became the name under which the magazine is generally cited: Graz literary surveys refer to the Feuilletonmagazin schreibkraft as established, etabliert, in the city's scene, and the steirischer herbst festival — Styria's major avant-garde festival — lists schreibkraft among the Graz cultural institutions with which it has cooperated. For a magazine of 500 copies, that kind of institutional recognition is the relevant measure of standing: not how many copies it sells, but whether the significant organisations of its cultural region treat it as a peer. On the documented evidence, they do.

The feuilleton idea: topic issues of essays and features

Every issue of Schreibkraft has a specific topic, and its essays and feature articles are chosen by the five editors to address it. To understand why that matters, a word about the feuilleton is needed. In German-language journalism the feuilleton is the section devoted to culture in the broad sense — literature, theatre, film, ideas, the essay — written in a literary register and permitted length, judgment and style. It is the part of the newspaper tradition in which Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar and generations of Austrian essayists worked. A magazine founded explicitly as a journal for cultural feuilleton in 1998 was therefore making a deliberate, even defiant, choice: at the moment when newspaper culture sections were shrinking, Schreibkraft proposed to do the feuilleton as a book-like, twice-yearly, topic-centred magazine.

The topic structure shapes the reading experience. Instead of a miscellany, each issue offers several essayistic approaches to one subject, so that an argument can develop across the issue and a reader encounters the topic from literary, sociological, artistic and personal angles in turn. In addition to the essays and features, the magazine publishes some narrative texts — fiction admitted alongside the essay where it serves the theme — and book reviews. Both supplements are consistent with the feuilleton brief: the feuilleton has always mixed criticism, essay and literary prose rather than policing the borders between them.

Book reviews and the small presses

One documented detail of Schreibkraft's practice deserves its own section, because it marks a real editorial choice: its book reviews review primarily books from small publishing houses. In the German-language book world, review attention is scarce and heavily concentrated on the lists of large houses with publicity departments. Small presses — the independent literary publishers of Austria, Germany and Switzerland, often publishing exactly the kind of essayistic and experimental writing that Schreibkraft itself represents — depend on the minority of journals willing to look beyond the big catalogues.

By directing its reviewing mainly at small-press books, Schreibkraft performs a service to the ecosystem it belongs to. The magazine, the small presses and their authors form a mutual-support structure characteristic of Austrian literary life, in which the same people write, edit, publish and review across a network of small institutions. It would be wrong to treat that as mere logrolling: the documented contributor list of the magazine, discussed below, includes many of the most respected names in contemporary Austrian writing, which suggests a standard of judgment rather than a favour bank. The point is structural — a 500-copy feuilleton magazine that reviews small-press books is one of the few places where those books are guaranteed a considered reading in print.

Authors: the documented contributor record

The strongest evidence of Schreibkraft's standing is the record of who has published in it. Reference accounts list authors from Austria, Switzerland and Germany, and the names documented include Elfriede Jelinek, Friederike Mayröcker, Wolf Haas, Franzobel, Peter Rosei, Werner Schwab, Andreas Okopenko, Ferdinand Schmatz and Franz Schuh — a roll that spans Nobel laureate, grande dame of Austrian poetry, bestselling crime novelist, dramatist and leading essayists. Alongside them stand writers such as Bettina Balàka, Ann Cotten, Klaus Ebner, Paulus Hochgatterer, Klaus Händl, Ralf B. Korte, Christian Loidl, Wolfgang Pollanz and Helmuth Schönauer, as well as critics, scholars and cultural commentators including Moritz Baßler and Manfred Prisching.

Two conclusions follow from that list, and both can be drawn without exaggeration. First, Schreibkraft was never a purely local Graz bulletin: from its documented contributor base it operated at the level of the Austrian national literature and drew on the wider German-language world. Second, its feuilleton format evidently suited established writers as well as emerging ones — an essay on a set topic in a well-regarded Graz magazine is a congenial commission for an author whose book work appears elsewhere. Wolfgang Pollanz, a co-founder of Sterz, appearing among Schreibkraft's authors also illustrates the interconnectedness of the Graz scene, in which the founders and editors of one magazine write for the others.

Frequency, circulation and scale

Schreibkraft appears twice a year, and its circulation is given as about 500 copies. This profile reports those figures exactly as documented and does not inflate them. A semiannual of 500 copies produces, across more than two and a half decades since 1998, a shelf of issues numbering in the dozens rather than the hundreds — each one, by the logic of the feuilleton format, a self-contained essay collection on its topic. The appropriate comparisons are its Graz peers: Lichtungen sells around 1,100 copies quarterly, and the late Sterz reached 8,000. Schreibkraft sits at the small end of that spectrum and is none the worse for it; its model is depth per issue and authority of contributors, not reach.

Small scale also shapes how such a magazine survives. Twice-yearly publication limits printing and postage costs to two cycles a year; an association publisher can combine modest public funding, subscriptions and sales; a five-person editorial board of volunteers or near-volunteers keeps fixed costs low. The vulnerabilities are equally clear — the loss of one or two key editors, or of a funding line, can end a title of this size — which is why the documented continuity from 1998 to the present, under a substantially stable editorial group, is itself a fact worth recording. Many Austrian magazines founded in the 1990s did not last a decade; Schreibkraft has lasted more than two and a half.

Schreibkraft in Graz, the city of literary magazines

Recent scholarly description of Graz calls it a city of literary magazines, a Stadt der Literaturzeitschriften, and lists the surviving configuration plainly: manuskripte continuing under Andreas Unterweger after Alfred Kolleritsch's death in 2020, the Lichtungen edited by Andrea Stift-Laube, the Feuilletonmagazin schreibkraft established alongside them, and the wall newspaper ausreißer visible on the city's walls. In that company Schreibkraft holds the essayistic brief. Where manuskripte publishes first publications of new literature and Lichtungen pairs literature with art and international partnerships, Schreibkraft is where Graz thinks in essays — about a topic, at length, in the feuilleton tradition.

That division of labour benefits the whole scene. A Graz writer can place a first story in one magazine, an art-paired text in another, and a considered essay in Schreibkraft; a Graz reader can follow all three and receive a rounded picture of contemporary writing and thinking. The Forum Stadtpark connection completes the circle: the institution that launched the Graz avant-garde in the 1960s also incubated, in 1998, the small feuilleton magazine that still carries its argumentative spirit in a quieter form.

What is not documented: an honest note

The reference record for Schreibkraft is genuinely thin compared with older Austrian titles, and intellectual honesty requires saying what cannot be verified from it. No complete list of issue topics from 1998 to the present is available in the summary sources; no audited circulation series exists beyond the documented figure of about 500; biographical detail about the editorial board beyond Werner Schandor's founding role and the five editors' names is not reliably summarised; and any claim about specific celebrated issues would be invention. This profile has therefore built its account from the facts that are documented — foundation, founder, institutional origin, publisher since 1999, frequency, circulation, topic-and-essay format, small-press reviewing, ISSN, and the named contributor record — and from the verifiable context of the Graz literary scene in which the magazine demonstrably operates.

Within those limits, the assessment can still be firm. Schreibkraft is a Graz cultural magazine founded in the Forum Stadtpark in 1998 by Werner Schandor, published since 1999 by the edition schreibkraft association, appearing twice a year in topic-centred issues of essays, features, narrative texts and small-press reviews, written by a contributor base that includes many of Austria's leading authors, and recognised by the city's cultural institutions as an established part of literary Graz. Small magazines are the load-bearing walls of a literary culture; at 500 copies, Schreibkraft is one of the smallest — and it has been bearing its share of the load since 1998.