Some Notes on the Cultural Periodicals of Post-War Germany

In view of the deep hiatus caused by the Nazi period and the war years, a brief survey of the present status of German periodicals may be of interest. In the following notes no attempt at completeness has been made. Such an attempt would of necessity be lengthy, for the number of such periodicals is very large. There is a certain difficulty in defining cultural periodicals. Learned journals have been excluded, as have all magazines dealing exclusively with art, music, or the theatre. Many of these, such as Kunst und Heim, Das Kunstwerk, Merian, or Deutsche Kirchenmusik, are of very high quality. On the other hand, publications so light in tone that they approach the level of the Sunday supplements are also excluded. There remain, however, a number of border-line cases. One such is Kulturarbeit (1949, Stuttgart) which is intended for general reading but which does not offer any literary material. Its subject matter-television, adult education, libraries, movies, town planning, theatre, and music-is treated in a general and popular way. For our present purposes we shall include only periodicals published in West Germany which include both essays and original literary works. Let us begin with one of the oldest of such reviews, the Deutsche Rundschau, founded in 1874 and now in its seventieth year of publication. It is edited by R. Pechel and published by the RuhrVerlag of Gelsenkirchen. During the first post-war years the copies were poorly printed, and learned and literary articles were largely ousted by political writing. Since 1950, however, both format and content are more worthy of the journal's reputation. The main competitor of the Deutsche Rundschau. is the Neue Rundschau, founded in 1890 as Freie Biihne. After a varied fate during the Nazi period, publication by the original publisher (S. Fischer, Frankfurt a.M.) was resumed in 1950. Politics is confined to a small appendix, contributions from the world's leading writers forming the main part of the contents. Westermanns Monatshefte (Braunschweig), which was not pub

German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German History and Society · German Literature and Culture Studies · History

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