Graz and “manuskripte”.

The literary magazine manuskripte, which was published by Alfred Kolleritsch from 1960 until his death in 2020, initially in close association with the Forum Stadtpark, is one of the first and most important institutional formations of the literary avant-garde in Austria. Members of the Vienna Group such as Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener, who until then had worked almost exclusively in the literary underground, and aspiring authors from Graz such as Barbara Frischmuth, Wolfgang Bauer, Gerhard Roth and Gert Jonke found their first publication opportunities here in a medium that belonged to the subsidized cultural sector. In contrast to the rest of Austria, the province of Styria was already characterized by a decidedly liberal cultural policy in the 1960s. The support that the avant-garde and experimental arts received in these early years also contributed significantly to the fact that by the mid-1970s it could be said throughout the German-speaking world that Graz was truly a capital of literature. Peter Handke, who was already one of the magazine`s regular authors in his early years, is rumored to have rehearsed his famous appearance at the Group 47 conference in Princeton, where he accused all German-language literature of Beschreibungsimpotenz (descriptive impotence), at a reading in the Forum Stadtpark. Elfriede Jelinek, the second Austrian Nobel Prize winner in recent decades, was also associated with the manuskripte from the very beginning. Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker also contributed to the journal at a very early stage and then consistently over the decades. In the form of a monograph, the present project (and partly also on the basis of previously inaccessible sources such as a large collection of Alfred Kolleritsch`s diaries) examines the conditions and forms of the emergence of an Austrian literary avant-garde whose rank is undisputed today. The founding of the literary journal manuskripte as an organ of the avant-garde in the environment of the Forum Stadtpark is also seen as a deliberate move against an established conservative literary landscape. The institutionalization of the avant-garde in Graz also includes the founding of the steirischer herbst avant-garde festival, which still exists today. The historical arc of the study stretches until 1973, when the Graz Authors` Assembly was founded - also in Graz - and thus formed a strong counterpart to the Austrian PEN Club. Overall, with the 1960s and early 1970s in Graz, the research project focuses on one of the decisive junctions in Austrian literary history.