terminology konkret

In the late fifties Klaus Rainer Röhl founded a student magazine called the studentkurier, whose name he later changed tokonkret. Röhl later revealed that konkret was almost wholly subsidized in its early years by huge cash infusions from communist East German sources.

As aggressively Marxist as it was aggressively hip, konkret attempted to defy many of the traditional conventions of German publishing, right down to its uncapitalized title. Röhl married Ulrike Meinhof in the early sixties and she quickly became konkret’seditor. After konkret’s East German benefactors pulled their support in the mid-sixties, Röhl changed the format from pure politics to a mix of pornography and politics, and saw the circulation rise exponentially.

Stefan Aust, the greatest of the Baader-Meinhof biographers, followed Meinhof as editor of konkret in the late 1960s and early 1970s.