Associations, Advocacy

It was not until the late 1960s/early 1970s that the history of the constitution of professional associations of writers was repeated in Germany and Austria. The Association of German Writers (VS) was founded by Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, and Martin Walser, among others, in Cologne in 1969, and IG Autoren was founded by Hilde Spiel and Milo Dor in Vienna in 1971. Prior to this and parallel to it, the Austrian Writers' Association emerged again or as new literary associations in 1945, the Austrian PEN Club (first founded in 1923, re-founded in 1947) and the Graz Authors' Assembly in 1973. With the constitution of IG Autoren, the social and idealistic rights of all Austrian authors and their associations were jointly represented until today. From 1979 - 1981, a committee formed with representatives of IG Autoren and other literary organizations and literary institutions organized the largest gathering of male and female writers ever seen in Austria, the "First Austrian Writers' Congress", which was attended by a total of about 800 people and which elaborated and adopted a catalog of measures that were supervised and successively implemented by IG Autorinnen Autoren in the following decades.

see 

www.vs.verdi.de, www.literaturhaus.at, www.oesv.or.at, www.penclub.at, www.gav.at