Konkret

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

konkret

The correct title of this article is konkret. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

konkret is a monthly German magazine "for politics and culture" (according to its subtitle) that has existed since 1955.

[edit] Origins

It was founded in 1955 with support of the central committee of the Free German Youth by communist-pacifist students around Herbert Mies und Klaus Rainer Röhl. Until 1957, it appeared as the Studentenkurier. Until 1964, it had close ideological and financial relations with the East Germany government.[1] Innovative in its style, it had great influence with radical and socially critical students. In the high phase of the German student movement of the sixties, it appeared biweekly and weekly.

Important authors such as Arno Schmidt, Kurt Hiller, Werner Riegel and Peter Rühmkorf published there in the fifties.

One of the most well-known workers at the magazine was Ulrike Meinhof, the chief editor from 1962. She ended her journalistic activities soon before she joined the Red Army Faction. On May 7, 1969, the house of konkret publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl was stormed by activists under Meinhof's leadership, its windows and furnishing destroyed. Röhl was also Meinhof's former husband and the father of her two children.

[edit] konkret since 1974

The current location of publication is Hamburg and the publisher since 1974 has been journalist Hermann L. Gremliza, who also writes the introduction column of the magazine.

konkret is presents itself as a radical leftist magazine, standing to left of Germany's established parties. Currently, it is often connected to the Anti-German movement, although this attribution has been rejected by Gremliza. Its maxim is "reading what others don't want to know" (lesen, was andere nicht wissen wollen).

During the Gremliza era, the following major writers have had their work published in konkret: