Working Group on Periodical Studies; Director of the Contemporary History section of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin. Member of the Eurozine Advisory Board.
Is the goal of a European public sphere best served by the creation of a supranational public service broadcaster, as has recently been proposed? Roman Léandre Schmidt and Carl Henrik Fredriksson are sceptical: rather than creating an artificial flagship, the EU must provide incentives for existing outlets to Europeanize their operations.
Thanks to a new wave of small intellectual magazines, an infectious buzz has returned to public debate in the United States. Roman Schmidt talks to David Marcus who, as a new editor at Dissent, is well placed to provide the lowdown what’s driving this genuinely critical movement.
The present French government has a profoundly ambivalent relationship with journalists and the press. President Nicolas Sarkozy has encouraged the public to treat journalists with mistrust; at the same time, his relationship with those who own the press is far too close, says the secretary-general of Reporters Sans Frontières.
Depression, revolution and the threat of fascism provided the impetus for Bertolt Brecht’s and Walter Benjamin’s magazine “Krise und Kritik” in the 1930s; thirty years later, in a world shaped by decolonization and bloc confrontation, Maurice Blanchot’s “Revue Internationale” was a similar attempt at an engaged form of publishing. Yet its internationalist ambitions ultimately proved to be its downfall, writes Roman Schmidt.
Antonin J. Liehm, editor of the Czech magazine “Litérarní noviny” until 1968 and founder of “Lettre Internationale”, has been at the forefront of numerous attacks on the “provincialism of major cultures”. One theme has persisted throughout: the idea of an international magazine.
