About Wespennest

Wespennest

Wespennest, whose name means wasps' nest and whose subtitle is Zeitschrift für brauchbare Texte und Bilder, magazine for usable texts and images, is an Austrian literary magazine published in Vienna. It was founded in 1969 by Peter Henisch and Helmut Zenker, appeared quarterly until 2009 and has been published twice a year since 2010. Each issue runs to 112 large-format pages and presents texts and images organised around a theme, drawn from a country, literature, art theory or politics, together with interviews, polemics, reportage, portraits, book and theatre reviews and photographic work. Its publisher is the Verein Gruppe Wespennest in Vienna, its documented circulation is 5,000 copies, its editors are Andrea Roedig and Andrea Zederbauer, and its print ISSN is 1012-7313. It is a founding journal of the Eurozine network of cultural journals and received the V.O. Stomps Prize of the city of Mainz in 2003.

Founded in the Vienna of 1968

Wespennest was founded in 1969 and grew, as its histories record, out of the Vienna 1968 scene as a project of a group of authors. Peter Henisch, who became one of Austria's leading novelists, and Helmut Zenker were its founders. The name was a programme in itself: a nest of stinging insects, a place from which uncomfortable texts would issue. The subtitle chosen at the start, magazine for usable texts and images, with its deliberate plainness, rejected both pure aesthetics and party-line literature in favour of writing that could be used, argued with and applied to the world. Retrospective accounts of the journal's first forty years credit it with transforming and updating the socio-critical demands of its founding era without selling out under the pressures of a changed market, a rare verdict for a journal of the 1968 generation, most of which either folded or became institutions of a very different kind.

Form: the thematic issue

The mature Wespennest format is the thematic dossier. Each large-format issue of 112 pages builds a focus, on a specific country, a literature, a question of art theory or a political theme, and surrounds it with the journal's standing genres: interviews, polemics, reportage, portraits, book and theatre criticism and photography presented as work in its own right, not illustration. That structure makes each issue closer to a small book than to a magazine, a tendency reinforced since 2010 by the move to twice-yearly publication, which doubled the weight of each appearance. Distribution through a contract with the Munich publisher C. H. Beck placed Wespennest in bookshops across the German-speaking world, an unusual channel for a Viennese literary journal and one that matches the book-like format: readers encounter it where they buy literature, not only where they buy periodicals.

A forum for European literature

Wespennest's contributor record documents its ambition. Its pages have carried internationally known authors including Friedrich Achleitner, Gabriela Adameşteanu, Gennadij Ajgi, Sadik Al-Azm, Mircea Cărtărescu, Inger Christensen, György Dalos, Ulrike Draesner, Katarina Frostenson, Arno Geiger, Georgi Gospodinov, Sabine Gruber, Friederike Mayröcker, Suketu Mehta, Elif Şafak, Warlam Schalamow, Robert Schindel, Ilija Trojanow and Tomas Venclova, among many others recorded in its reference history. The pattern in that list is the journal's dialogue with Europe, and above all with Eastern Europe, from Slovenia in the south to Russia in the north, alongside Western and Scandinavian voices. Long before European cultural integration became a funding programme, Wespennest practised it editorially, translating and introducing literatures that German-language readers would otherwise not have met. Its country focuses have functioned as compact introductions to national literatures, used by readers, students and other editors as reference points.

Eurozine and the Stomps Prize

Two documented honours mark the journal's institutional standing. Wespennest is one of the founding journals of Eurozine, the network that links European cultural journals and republishes their articles across borders in many languages, giving small journals a continental reach their print runs could never achieve. Membership of that network is a natural extension of the journal's own European programme. In 2003 Wespennest received the V.O. Stomps Prize of the city of Mainz, an award for small-press publishing named after the pioneer of the German small press. The prize recognised exactly what the journal represents: independent, editor-led publishing sustained over decades outside the large media groups. For a directory profile these are the kind of externally verifiable distinctions that separate a journal of record from a merely surviving one, and Wespennest holds both.

Publishing structure and people

The journal's publisher is the Verein Gruppe Wespennest, an association in Vienna, the same collective form with which it began as an authors' project. Its documented editors are Andrea Roedig and Andrea Zederbauer, with Zederbauer also recorded in reference data as managing director, and Walter Famler appears in older reference material as publisher, reflecting the journal's changing masthead across decades. The association form matters to the journal's identity: Wespennest has no media-group owner, no cross-subsidy from consumer titles, and no advertising-led business model of the commercial kind. It survives on sales, subscriptions, cultural support and the commitment of its editors, the classic economics of the European cultural journal, with the classic vulnerability that a small circulation, documented at 5,000 copies, implies.

From quarterly to twice a year

The change of frequency in 2010, from quarterly publication since 1969 to two issues a year, is the journal's most visible modern adjustment. Reference accounts present it as a consolidation rather than a decline: fewer, larger, more book-like issues, each 112 pages in large format, sold through bookshops as well as subscriptions. Many literary journals of the 1968 generation did not survive the combined pressures of rising print costs, the internet's capture of topical debate and the ageing of their founding readerships. Wespennest's response, slow down, thicken, and lean into the European network through Eurozine, is a documented strategy for the literary journal in the digital age: concede speed to the internet and defend the things print does uniquely, duration, dossiers, translation and the edited gathering of voices around a theme.

Wespennest and Austrian literary life

Within Austria, Wespennest belongs to the small set of literary journals, with Literatur und Kritik in Salzburg and manuskripte in Graz, that have carried the country's literary conversation across generations. Vienna's journal scene is crowded, but Wespennest's 1969 founding, its international contributor list and its European network role give it seniority and reach that newer titles cannot claim. It has provided a forum, in the words of its own retrospective record, for a literary community and a critical public: a place where Austrian writers meet their European peers in print, where polemics can be conducted at essay length, and where photography and text are treated as equal arts. The journal's presence in bookshops across the German-speaking world through C. H. Beck distribution extended that Viennese forum to readers in Germany and Switzerland who might never visit a Viennese bookshop.

The wasps' nest idea

A word about the name and subtitle, because they encode the journal's whole poetics. A wasps' nest is defensive, collective and ready to sting; a magazine for usable texts declares that literature should do work in the world. The founding generation of 1969, formed by the student movement and by Austria's belated confrontation with its National Socialist past, wanted a journal that would disturb. That the same journal is now praised for updating those demands without selling out suggests the sting was institutionalised rather than lost: polemic remains one of its documented genres, interviews probe rather than celebrate, and thematic issues take up politics as readily as literature. Few titles wear their founding intentions so openly for so long, or are judged, as Wespennest is in its reference history, by how faithfully they kept them.

Wespennest today

Wespennest today appears twice a year from Vienna under editors Andrea Roedig and Andrea Zederbauer, published by the Verein Gruppe Wespennest, in 112-page thematic issues of texts and images, with a documented circulation of 5,000 and a continuing role in the Eurozine network it helped to found. Founded in 1969 by Peter Henisch and Helmut Zenker out of Vienna's 1968 generation, it has outlived nearly all of its founding-era peers by adapting its rhythm without abandoning its programme. In this directory it stands, alongside Literatur und Kritik, for Austria's literary journal tradition, and of the two it is the insurgent: the wasps' nest that learned how to last.