Die Neue Rundschau

(New review)

   a distinguished literary journal, established in 1889 as the weekly Die Freie Buhne (The free stage) by Maxi-milian Harden,* Otto Brahm, Samuel Fischer,* and Theodor Wolff.* Its originators were inspired by the idea that the period s Naturalism (e.g., Gerhart Hauptmann* and Henrik Ibsen) might mold a new society. After several title changes and editorial shifts, the journal assumed a liberal political agenda under Oskar Bie (editor, 1895-1922) and was renamed Neue Rundschau in 1904. Never radically liberal, as compared to its rival Die Weltbuhne,* by the Weimar era and under the cosmopolitan editorship of the Fischer Verlag's Rudolf Kayser (1922-1933), it was an esteemed, nonpartisan monthly examining art, literature, politics, psychoanalysis, and youth problems. Although its circulation never ex-ceeded ten thousand, its readers were influential and its authors internationally renowned: for example, Thomas Mann,* Robert Musil,* Bertrand Russell, Jose Ortega y Gassett, and Virginia Woolf. In January 1933 Peter Suhrkamp suc-ceeded Kayser. Among its prolific authors, Suhrkamp later described Neue Rundschau: "It is no falsehood to point out that this journal was not founded for a movement, a school, or the like, but for the creative, or better still, artistic individuals of the present; for artists, that is [in all areas of culture], and not for a special elite and not for the general public (Unseld). Suhrkamp published Neue Rundschau until the NSDAP suppressed it in 1944. The first German publisher to obtain a license for resumed operations, he resurrected it in 1950 under a reestablished Fischer Verlag.

   REFERENCES:Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals; Greenberg, Literature and Sensibilities; Unseld, Author and His Publisher.