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 Vienna Art Club. Despite their differences, they were united by an emancipatory literary concept, fundamentally engaging with various areas of language and transforming them into aesthetic dimensions. The group's texts are correspondingly diverse: sound poems, text montages, dialect poems, visual and auditory texts, plays, chansons. Characteristic of the group's context are not only unifying artistic tendencies but also numerous collaborative works, a specific phenomenon of cooperation that almost inevitably developed 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 radicality. Gerhard Rühm's anthology, first published in 1967, is being reissued for a new generation of readers.