Sinn und Form: Anatomy of a literary journal

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Despite being a product of the GDR, Sinn und Form achieved a unique international reputation within the Cold War context of the 1950s as the prestigious literary journal of the East Berlin Academy of Arts. Not only was that status maintained throughout the forty-year history of the GDR in the face of SED attempts to instrumentalise the journal and by different editors with very different political and aesthetic backgrounds, but Sinn und Form is one of the few former East German institutions to have successfully negotiated the transition to post-unification Germany. This project sets out to write the first comprehensive history of the journal, seeking to explain how the 'legend' of the journal was constructed and, above all, the remarkable capacity of the journal to maintain that reputation over more than fifty years. At the same time, the project will shed light on the constituent elements which shape literary journals as institutions within the cultural field and on the role played by such journals as agents in that field.