Little Mags – post -war shortage and abysmality

The chance that you will not read this text on a printed page newspaper, but online, on the screen, perhaps as an e-paper, this chance is pretty high. Print is no longer very popular for a long time, daily newspapers like Magazine are known to be difficult. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of literary magazines in German-speaking countries, which are tirelessly published two or four times a year for no or very little money and the audience prose, poems, to read essays that it would not have been met anywhere else.

If you have studied German studies once, you may know that Friedrich Schiller tried for two years to run a magazine called “The Horns”, at the end of the 18th century. Around 160 years after him, she was founded in Hanover by Kurt Morawietz, the title was set in a customary small letter. The current issue deals with two major outsider figures of German -language literature: Christian Geissler and Inge Müller.

Geissler (1928–2008) is certainly one of the most interesting communist writings of the old FRG: In his novel “Advertisement” (1960), he was the first to refer to continuities in National Socialism in West Germany, in “Kamalatta” (1988), linguistically experimentally, with the RAF. Geissler’s widow Sabine Peters has put together a dossier that enables “new views of life and work”. Among other things, there are picture -art articles, such as ink pictures, oil paintings, collages, an autobiographical sketch and a long poem by the author himself. The poet Kathrin Hensel sends a letter to the dead, it is about radio plays, film scripts of a man who never wanted to put up with the post -nazist normality.

Most of the poet Inge Müller (1925–1966) are known to most of the people to be married to Heiner Müller and put an end to her life with her head in the gas stove. The dossier, compiled by Tom Schulz, demonstrates how her narrow work wrote over generations, with all the thematic darkness, post -war emergency and abyss, encouraged to sit down with poetry in a combative relationship with the world. Annett Gröschner, Sylvia Geist, Kerstin Schulz and Jayne-Anne Hedgee wrote Müller dedicated poems for this issue, Kerstin Preiwuss analyzed in “Another hour zero” Müller’s poetics. They are approaches to a writer whose texts demand with all the suffering depicted: continue to write!

A completely different writer, Lynn Hejinian, like Müller, a literary exception and a stroke of luck for German -speaking readers, is the focus of the magazine »Writing booklet« from Essen, who have been forgetting avant -gardens for decades that are being forgotten in elaborate dossiers. Hejinian, who died last year at the age of 82, is commonly assigned to the Language Poetry. Their representatives began to write texts in the United States of the late 60s- in the period of the anti-war and civil rights movement- in which language is no longer used as a functional transducer of meaning, but rather correct grammar, sign, narrative structures, in order to explore the new way of linguistic perception and not to dust off through end consumer language waste and propaganda.

With “My Life” (1980) Hejinian succeeded in a beautiful text that does not write autobiography together on the basis of chronological events, but rather follows linguistic events that do not pull strict linear strokes through a path of life, they are looking for free forms at every moment. Norbert Lange and Sonja vom Brocke, who put together the dossier, succeed Hejinian translations by making German sentences and verses elastic without bending them artistically.

Let us move towards now: The Leipzig Literature magazine “Edit” has been proving that you can collect lyrics at the pulse of time without hingring the present. In the elaborately designed spring edition there are very different varieties of literary writing, which gives little on the old categories of market and school: lyrical, association-driven prose, protocol-like texts, multi-column poems and such about internet culture, drawings by Lina Ehrentraut, which result in a comic.

A particularly insightful contribution is the conversation between Therese Luserke and Ruth-Maria Thomas about female writing. It is about “the power of expectations”, “the old cliché, men would not like to talk about themselves”, and that the “history of women runs through hands like sand”, from generation to generation. And the question of whether female writing should really be intended as a category and not more as a process. The novel excerpt “Mother Mevlüde” by Özlem Özgül Dündar can perhaps be read with a new look after this discussion, because Dündar writes a call, trying a conversation. She tries to get someone back and does not formulate from an all-check-up story that wants to bring order to life.

The latest periodic in this magazine books entitled »Berlin Review«: Online essays appear continuously, which mostly arise from reviews of individual or thematically related books, but not with summary, classification, judgment, but can be removed from the meeting business. Many contributions come from academics, but poets and artists always have their say. “Our focus remains,” said founding editor Samir Sellami in an interview with “ND” last year. You can find texts about the Middle East conflict here, which would hardly print an intellectual leaf in times of the great state rushes in Germany.

The »Berlin Review« appears three times a year as a print edition, designed chic, with a photo series by Anne Lass. Here you can find a preliminary print from the new volume with stories by the Argentine World Class Eliteratin Samanta Schweblin, the Brazilian poet Ricardo Domeneck portrays his early died compatriot Victor Heringer, who appears in German in March-Verlag. The British Miriam Stoney, based in Vienna, is concerned about the huge success of the novel authors Rachel Cusk (USA) and Sally Rooney (Ireland). Elad Lapidot from Israel takes on the complex diaspora concept of the often scolded Judtih Butler. Further back in the issue you can follow the reflections of Diedrich Diederichsen about the Völkisch-Liberbertar and his own misjudgments about neoliberal traditionalism outgrowth; The text bears the beautiful title “The Rohe and the Chain-Life”, an allusion to the ethnologist Levi-Strauss.

It is still worth subscribing to the magazines presented here to subscribe, read, keeping it up. The internet is always faster, but when it comes to discovering texts away from the algorithms, finding new names, really taking time for texts, the printed square paper mates are preferable.

Horen No. 298. Wallstein. 264 p., 16.50 €.
Nr.104 sch agreis. Rigoon. 160 S., BR. 16,50 €)
Edit. Nr. 94. 123 S., br., 12 €.
Berlin Review Reader 3. 124 S., br., 14 €.