Viennese group

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Vienna Group was a loose association of Austrian writers that emerged from the Art Club and formed in Vienna around 1954 under the influence of HC Artmann . In addition to Artmann himself, Friedrich Achleitner , Konrad Bayer , Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener were among its members, but Elfriede Gerstl , Ernst Jandl , Friederike Mayröcker , Andreas Okopenko and Gerald Bisinger were also in close contact with the group.

The works of the Viennese group have their literary roots in Baroque poetry as well as in Expressionism , Dadaism and Surrealism . Important impulses also came from representatives of language skepticism, language criticism and language philosophy (such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Fritz Mauthner or Ludwig Wittgenstein ).

The language awareness of the Viennese group is also evident in their understanding of language as an optical and acoustic material. Based on this idea, its members worked intensively, among other things, on the development of sound poetry and visual lyric poetry . For Artmann in particular, the phonetic richness of the dialect was an important starting point, but the more or less consistently used lower case letters can also be considered in this context.

After Hans Carl Artmann went his own way from 1958, Konrad Bayer's suicide on October 10, 1964 finally marked the end of the Viennese group.

Historical background

After the Second World War , which in Austria had fatal consequences for the civilian population in particular, there was a difficult economic and social situation that is known as “zero hour”, especially in art and literature. That is, there was a kind of "standstill" in every way.

During the twelve years of National Socialism , during which Expressionist, Dadaist and other contemporary literature was banned and blood-and-soil literature was cultivated, everything in culture was also at zero. The National Socialists tried to destroy what Adolf Hitler called "degenerate art" with actions such as book burnings . Many well-known authors such as Bertolt Brecht , Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque had left the country after the National Socialists came to power and lived in exile. As a result, many important literary works were not accessible after the war.

Since the Austrian cultural scene had come to a standstill due to famine, bombing and the deliberate extermination of the Jewish population, the Austrian avant-garde developed with a delay. In other European countries such as B. France, however, an avant-garde had existed for decades.

In Austria after the Second World War there was a conservative climate and a return to traditional ways of thinking and values. During this time, attempts were made to revive the Austrian identity. Local poets arrested in the 19th century such as Peter Rosegger or the National Socialist Karl Heinrich Waggerl and the classical canon should be decisive in literature. As a result, there was only limited publication opportunities for new things and an ignorance of new literary endeavors. In this isolation it was only possible to develop modern and alternative ways of thinking within a group.

Creation of the Vienna Group

In February 1947 the Art Club was founded, initially an association of visual artists (e.g. Alfred Kubin and Friedensreich Hundertwasser ). This was a cultural center of the so-called Viennese scene. In 1952, Gerhard Rühm and HC Artmann met in the club's "Strohkoffer", later they met Konrad Bayer and the jazz musician Oswald Wiener, and Friedrich Achleitner was the last member of the Viennese group. The group found points of contact and role models in avant-garde movements such as late expressionism , dadaism and surrealism . Since it followed these directions in time, the Viennese group is assigned to the so-called “neo-avant-garde”. In 1953 Artmann defined the so-called “poetic act” as the expression of a spontaneous act that is not tied to a recording medium.

From 1954 the artists met in the Cafe “Glory”, which marked the beginning of the group's fertile period. In the following years a radical attitude towards art developed and an increasing isolation. The group was directed against conservative literary currents of the post-war period and did not find broad recognition. The writers therefore had great problems getting their work published.

In December 1954 they founded the “Exil” club, which composers and painters also joined. In the mid-1950s, the members increasingly took positions on political issues and experimented intensively with the language. They increasingly dealt with " Concrete Poetry " by reducing the text to basic vowels and generally writing it in lower case. In doing so, they dissolved the traditional genre poetics and gave the visual and acoustic presentation meaning. In 1956 a number of the magazine "alpha" appeared with a new domain of the Viennese group. In doing so, they introduced experimental dialect poetry, among other things .

literature

  • Gerhard Rühm (Ed.): The Vienna Group, Achleitner, Artmann, Bayer, Rühm, Wiener. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1985, ISBN 978-3-498-07300-8 .
  • Peter Weibel (ed.): The wiener group. a moment of modernity 1954-1960 / the visual works and actions. Springer, Vienna & New York 1997. In: Exhibition catalog Biennale di Venezia 1997.
  • Michael Backes: Experimental semiotics in literary avant-garde. About the Wiener Gruppe with reference to Concrete Poetry. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7705-3450-6 .
  • Thomas Eder , Juliane Vogel: “Different sentences appear”. The Viennese group in action. Zsolnay, Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-552-05444-8 , Profile. Magazine of the Austrian Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vol. 15.
  • Gerhard Fuchs: Avant-gardism in the fifties: the Viennese group : In: Hubert Lengauer (Hrsg.): “Filed time”? Austrian literature of the fifties. Vienna 1992.
  • Klaus Kastberger : Vienna 50/60. An Austrian avant-garde. In: The 1950s. Art and Art Appreciation in Vienna , Springer 2009, pp. 35–46. Online at academia.edu (German / English)
  • Wolfgang Gratzer : Viennese group. In: Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon . Online edition, Vienna 2002 ff., ISBN 3-7001-3077-5 ; Print edition: Volume 5, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-7001-3067-8 .