Dimension2
Independent bilingual literary magazine. Edited by Ingo R. Stoehr. Editorial offices are currently located in Nacogdoches, Texas.
The magazine aims to give an Englishspeaking audience immediate access to the whole spectrum of contemporary literary production in the major German-speaking countries of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
Exclusively devoted to contemporary German-language literature, Dimension2 prints German original texts and their translations into English on facing pages. Literary texts include prose, poetry, and drama; short texts, such as poems and short prose, are published in full, and longer texts, such as novels and theater plays, in excerpt. Although the focus is on creative literature, the magazine also publishes interviews with authors, publishers, and literary scholars; essays on literary and cultural issues; and black-and-white reproductions of artwork.So far the magazine has published over 200 authors, ranging from young talents who saw their first publication in English translation to well-established writers, including Gunter Grass, Hans Christoph Buch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Barbara Frischmuth, Ludwig Harig, Rolf Hochhuth, Sarah Kirsch, Gunter Kunert, Botho Strauβ, Uwe Timm, and Christa Wolf. In a similar way, the translations are done by a wide range of practioners: some are graduate students at the beginning of their career; others are well-respected translators and scholars, such as Reinhold Grimm, Burton Pike, A. Leslie Willson, and the late Andre Lefevere.
Each volume consists of three issues (January, May, and September) of approximately 140 to 160 pages each, and each issue is unified by a special focus. For the first five volumes, the January issues focused on new publications from the previous fall, including interviews with publishers, such as Siegfried Unseld, Michael Kruger, and Daniel Keel; the May issues introduced literary archives, including the German Literary Archives in Marbach and the Swiss Literary Archives in Berne; and the September issues presented literature with a thematic focus, such as the image of the New Germany (after unification), America, the classical tradition, and the Third World. Beginning with volume 6, the basic publication plan was made more flexible to allow for double issues, such as on poetry and the literature of the years 1999 to 2001 (the turn of the millennium).
Dimension2 prints approximately 700 to 900 copies per run. Publication is made possible by two factors: government support and volunteer work. From the inception of Dimension2, the German government’s agency for international cultural exchange, Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes, has supplied generous support with a standing subscription, accounting for about half the magazine’s subscription base. Individual issues have also received additional support from the Swiss Cultural office, ProHelvetia; the Deutscher Liter- aturfonds in Darmstadt; and the Austrian Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellory) in Vienna. In spite of this support, publication of Dimension2 also depends on the magazine’s various contributors forgoing pay: editor and translators volunteer their services, and authors and publishers grant copyright free of charge on a one-time and nonexclusive basis.
Dimension2 has been published since 1994, but the superscript 2 in its title pays tribute to its tradition: it is the successor publication to Dimension, which was founded in 1968 and edited by A. Leslie Willson at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1994, the same year Dimension ceased publication, the first issue of Di- mension2 appeared.
Ingo R. Stoehr
See also Literature (German), the United States in; Literature (German American) in the Nineteenth Century; Literature, German Canadian
References and Further Reading
Dimension2: Contemporary German- Language Literature. http://members.aol.com∕germanlit∕dimension2.html.