The dispute between “Lettre International” and “Sense and Form”

It’s an unstoppable campaign: why Frank Berberich, the publisher and editor-in-chief of “Lettre International”, polemicizes against the magazine “Sinn und Form”. A guest post.

II owe the publication of a series of texts to the quarterly “Lettre International” since 1999, which would also have been suitable for monthly publications such as “Merkur” or “Blätter für deutsche und Internationale Politik”; they would have been out of place in “Sinn und Form”, the bimonthly publication of the Academy of Arts, which I have been associated with as an author for decades. There were contributions with a broader sense of political component, an interview about the “big experiment German unity”, reflections on “Geography is destiny” and the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR, an investigation into the historically unresolved background of June 17, 1953 and other more; with its publication, the magazine declared the political independence and foresight that was inscribed in its program from the very beginning.

Certainly, a later article on Beethoven’s largely unknown Europa-Kantata from 1814 could also have been in “Sinn und Form”, although it would never have occurred to me that these two fundamentally different periodicals were in competition with each other, the journalistic giant “Lettre International” with its large format, which also offered space for long texts rich in footnotes, with the rich graphic design, the geographically far-reaching subject area and a circulation of 18,000 copies and the almost Spartan “Contributions to Literature” in terms of design, circulation and subject matter. (That’s the subtitle of “Sinn und Form”), which was founded in the immediate post-war period, has not changed its shape since 1949 and still sees itself as a literary magazine that also addresses the remote.