About Sterz

Sterz

Sterz was an Austrian magazine for literature, art and cultural politics published in Graz, in the province of Styria. It appeared from 1977 until 2017 and for much of that time it occupied a distinctive place in Austrian cultural life: it was a non-commercial magazine, produced by a cultural association rather than a commercial publishing house, yet it reached a circulation that few comparable Austrian literary and cultural periodicals could match. Contemporary reference accounts, summarised in the German-language Wikipedia entry on the magazine and based on the magazine's own records, put its circulation at 8,000 copies and described it as Austria's largest non-commercial culture magazine. That combination — a large circulation by independent-magazine standards, a subscription and bookshop distribution model, and an explicitly cultural-political programme covering literature and art — is the essential fact that any account of Sterz has to start from.

The magazine was based in Graz, a city that by the late 1970s already had an unusually dense literary infrastructure for its size. Graz was the home of manuskripte, founded in 1960, of the Forum Stadtpark, and of a generation of writers associated with the Graz avant-garde. Sterz was founded a generation later than manuskripte and it did not compete with it on the same terms: where manuskripte concentrated on first publication of new literary writing, Sterz set itself a broader brief, joining literature and art to cultural politics. Readers who follow Austrian literary history will often encounter the Graz titles named together — manuskripte, Sterz, Schreibkraft and Lichtungen in Graz, alongside titles in Vienna, Salzburg and Innsbruck — as the traditional core of the country's literary-magazine landscape. Sterz belonged firmly in that company for four decades.

Founding in Graz in 1977

Sterz was founded in 1977 by five people: Erich Baumann, Wolfgang Pollanz, Horst A. Schirgi, Wolfgang Temmel and Gerd Wagner. The founding group edited the first four issues of the magazine themselves. The reference record preserves that founding line-up and the detail that the founders were also the first editors, which underlines how closely the magazine was tied, at the outset, to a small circle of Graz cultural workers rather than to an institution or a commercial publisher. Wolfgang Pollanz, one of the founders, remained a visible figure in Graz literary life in later decades, and the magazine's origins in that milieu help to explain its programme: it was made by participants in the scene it covered, not by a distant media company observing it from outside.

The year of foundation matters for understanding what Sterz set out to do. The late 1970s in Austria were a period in which independent cultural initiatives, alternative publishing projects and association-based magazines multiplied, often in deliberate contrast to the large commercial illustrated magazines and to the cultural pages of the daily press. A quarterly magazine for literature, art and cultural politics, run by a cultural association in Graz, fitted that moment precisely. It could take positions, devote whole issues to a theme, and give space to writing and art that had no natural home in the commercial press — and, crucially, it could do so without needing to chase advertising or newsstand sales in the way a commercial title had to.

Publisher, association and distribution

Sterz was published in Graz by Verlag Sterz, with the Kulturverein Sterz, the Sterz cultural association, as its publisher in the institutional sense recorded in reference listings. That association structure is significant. Association publishing was, and remains, a common organisational form for Austrian literary magazines — Podium, Erostepost and SALZ in this same group of Austrian titles are all association publications — because it allows a magazine to combine volunteer and professional labour, to apply for public cultural funding, and to keep editorial decisions inside a body whose stated purpose is cultural rather than commercial.

Distribution, according to the documented record, worked through subscriptions, through direct hand sales, and through some 390 book and magazine shops across Austria. That figure of 390 outlets is worth pausing on: for a non-commercial quarterly it represents a genuinely national presence, not merely a Graz or Styrian one. A reader in Vienna, Salzburg, Linz or Innsbruck could encounter Sterz in a bookshop, and a subscriber anywhere in the country could receive it by post. The 8,000-copy circulation recorded for the magazine has to be read alongside that distribution network: Sterz was not a small-circulation little magazine in the usual sense, even though it shared the non-commercial, association-based model of much smaller titles such as Schreibkraft, whose documented circulation is around 500 copies.

A quarterly for literature, art and cultural politics

The magazine's self-description, preserved in its categorisation as a magazine for literature, art and cultural politics, defined three fields rather than one. Literature meant new writing — prose and poetry by Austrian and German-language authors. Art meant visual work and coverage of artistic practice. Cultural politics meant something more argumentative: essays and interventions about how culture is funded, organised, valued and contested in Austria. That third element distinguished Sterz from a purely literary magazine. It gave the title a campaigning and reflective dimension, a place where the conditions of cultural production themselves could be discussed by the people subject to them.

Because Sterz was thematic and quarterly, each issue could be built around a subject and given room to develop it from several angles — literary, artistic and political at once. The one theme that is securely documented in the surviving record is also the most poignant: the last regular issue, number 112, published in 2014, was devoted to the theme of Schönheit, beauty. A magazine that had spent decades joining aesthetic questions to political ones closing its regular run with an issue on beauty is a fitting, if melancholy, bibliographic fact, and it is one of the few individual issue themes that can be stated here with confidence, because it is explicitly recorded in the reference sources rather than inferred.

Place in the Graz and Austrian magazine landscape

To understand Sterz's standing, it helps to set it beside its Graz contemporaries. manuskripte, founded in 1960 by Alfred Kolleritsch, was the senior Graz literary magazine and the most internationally noted, famous for early publication of writers such as Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek. Lichtungen, founded in 1979, built a reputation for promoting young authors and for international city and country partnerships, especially with southern and eastern Europe. Perspektive, also dating to 1977, pursued avant-garde paradigms. Schreibkraft, founded in 1998, worked as a cultural feuilleton. Sterz, founded the same year as Perspektive, was the Graz title that most explicitly added cultural politics to literature and art, and — on its documented circulation — the one that reached the largest readership of the non-commercial group.

Surveys of Austrian literature routinely list Sterz among the country's traditional and important literary magazines, naming it in the same breath as Literatur und Kritik and Erostepost in Salzburg, Wespennest and Kolik in Vienna, and DUM in Lower Austria. That repeated listing in general accounts of Austrian literature is itself evidence of standing: Sterz was not an obscure local bulletin but a recognised part of the national literary infrastructure, the network of magazines through which new writing circulated, reputations were first formed, and debates about Austrian culture were conducted outside the daily newspapers.

Editors and continuity over four decades

The documented editorial history begins with the five founders editing issues 1 to 4, and continues with a succession of further editors recorded in the reference entry, beginning with Wolfgang Pollanz and Wolfgang Temmel on issue 5. Beyond that opening sequence, the publicly available summary record does not provide a complete, reliably dated list of every editor across forty years, and this profile does not invent one. That limit should be stated openly: a full editorial history of Sterz would require work in the magazine's own archive and in complete runs of the issues themselves, where mastheads record the responsible editors issue by issue.

What can be said without speculation is that the magazine sustained continuous quarterly publication from 1977 through its last regular issue in 2014 — a run of 112 regular numbers — and then produced a final special issue in 2017. Continuity on that scale, for a non-commercial association magazine, implies a succession of editors and contributors willing to do largely unglamorous organisational work — commissioning, editing, fundraising, distribution — over decades. Literary magazines rarely survive forty years; the ones that do, as the Austrian record shows with manuskripte, SALZ, Podium and Sterz alike, tend to be those anchored in an association and a local scene that keeps renewing the people prepared to run them.

The final years: issue 112 and the 2017 special issue

The end of Sterz came in two stages, and the distinction between them matters for an accurate record. In 2014 the magazine published number 112, on the theme Schönheit (beauty), and that was its last regular issue. Quarterly publication in the ordinary sense therefore ended in 2014, not in 2017. Three years later, in 2017, Sterz appeared one final time with a special issue — described in the reference record as a Sondernummer, a special number also numbered in connection with 112 — devoted to the work of Franz E. Kneissl. With that special issue, the magazine ceased publication entirely, forty years after its foundation.

Accounts of Sterz sometimes compress those two dates into a single lifespan of 1977 to 2017, which is correct as a statement of the magazine's total span but can mislead if read as forty years of unbroken quarterly issues. The more precise statement, and the one used throughout this profile, is: regular quarterly publication from 1977 to 2014, ending with number 112, Schönheit; a final special issue on Franz E. Kneissl in 2017; then closure. Because the title is closed, this profile is written in the past tense throughout, as the historical record requires.

Why Sterz mattered

Sterz mattered for reasons that go beyond any single issue. First, it demonstrated that a non-commercial, association-run magazine could operate at a scale — 8,000 copies, 390 retail outlets, nationwide subscription distribution — normally associated with commercial publishing, without surrendering its editorial independence to advertisers or a parent media group. Second, it held literature, art and cultural politics together in one publication at a time when those fields were increasingly separated into specialist journals and newspaper supplements. Third, it belonged to, and helped to sustain, the Graz literary ecosystem that made a medium-sized Styrian city one of the capitals of German-language literature in the late twentieth century.

For writers, a magazine of Sterz's kind offered something the book trade could not: a relatively quick route into print, a themed context in which a text would be read alongside others, and an audience of engaged readers, booksellers and fellow writers across Austria. For readers, it offered a curated encounter with new writing and art and a running argument about the politics of culture. The loss of such a magazine is therefore not only bibliographic. When a title like Sterz closes, a piece of connective tissue in a national literature — one of the places where writers, artists, editors and readers met on paper — closes with it.

What the record does and does not show

An honest profile must end by marking the limits of the available evidence. The securely documented facts about Sterz are its foundation in Graz in 1977 by Erich Baumann, Wolfgang Pollanz, Horst A. Schirgi, Wolfgang Temmel and Gerd Wagner; its quarterly rhythm; its circulation of 8,000 copies and its standing as Austria's largest non-commercial culture magazine; its distribution through subscriptions, hand sales and around 390 book and magazine shops; its last regular issue, number 112 on Schönheit, in 2014; and its final special issue on Franz E. Kneissl in 2017, after which it ceased publication. Its website was sterzschrift.at, listed in the batch record, and its publisher of record was Verlag Sterz in Graz with the Kulturverein Sterz as publishing association.

What the summary sources do not reliably provide — and what this profile therefore does not assert — includes a complete issue-by-issue thematic index, full editor lists for every year, audited circulation figures for individual years, and a systematic account of individual contributors. Readers who need that level of detail should consult complete runs of the magazine in Austrian libraries and the magazine's own archived web presence. Within those limits, the picture is clear enough: Sterz was, for four decades, one of the significant independent cultural magazines of Austria — Graz-based, nationally distributed, and committed to the proposition that literature, art and the politics of culture belong in the same conversation.