Die Wiener Gruppe

The Vienna Group - Friedrich Achleitner, H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener - formed between 1952 and 1955 from a circle of avant-garde artists around the Viennese 'art-club'. Despite all their differences, they were united by an emancipative literary concept, the fundamental examination of the most diverse areas of language and their transfer into aesthetic dimensions. The group's texts are correspondingly diverse: sound poems, text montages, dialect poems, visual and audio texts, plays, chansons. Characteristic of the group's coherence, however, are not only unifying artistic tendencies, but also numerous collaborative works, a specific phenomenon of cooperation that developed almost inevitably from certain working methods such as montage. Even 70 years after the founding of the Vienna Group, the texts have lost none of their aesthetic radicalism. Gerhard Rühm's anthology, first published in 1967, appears in a new edition for a new generation of readers.