wiener gruppe

The Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) was founded as a creative island in the conservative waters of post-war Austria and its existence is usually dated to the decade 1954-1964.The core of the group consisted of Gerhard Rühm, Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Oswald Wiener and, until 1958, Hans Carl Artmann. The group radically experimented with words and live action, and thus represented in the Austrian milieu a largely isolated offshoot of the neo-avant-garde tendencies that had developed since the 1950s, especially in Europe and America.

The Wiener Gruppe programmatically sought to bring back into poetry what had been purposely destroyed during the Nazi regime and which, in fact, had never been very successful in Austria: it drew on Dada and Surrealism, and made extensive use of the techniques of literary collage and montage. The authors also worked with Viennese dialect, trivial literature, black romance, Viennese folk farce, but also obscure textbooks and technical manuals. The aim was both to shock and to expand the notion of poetry and the poetic act as much as possible.

Czech edition