In 1999, the University of Hildesheim established a programme in Creative Writing and Cultural Journalism — one of the first of its kind in Germany, led by professors Hanns-Josef Ortheil and Christian Schärf. Within two years, the students had done what students tend to do when given the tools and not enough outlets: they started a magazine. BELLA triste — the name is Italian for "beautiful sadness" — published its first issue in 2001, and has appeared three times a year ever since, making it one of the longest-running student-founded literary magazines in the German-speaking world. In 2003, the team formalised the operation as a registered nonprofit, the BELLA triste e.V., supported by the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH Stiftung, the Deutscher Literaturfonds, and several other cultural foundations.
The editorial team has always been entirely volunteer — students on the Hildesheim campus who work without pay, keep their own office on the Neustädter Markt in the city centre, and manage a network of roughly 450 contributing authors. Each new generation of editors is trained by the outgoing one over the course of a single issue, and the editorial direction shifts with every cohort. This constant turnover, which might seem like a structural weakness, turns out to be the magazine's greatest asset: each team reinvents the publication from within, bringing fresh perspectives while inheriting the institutional memory of the one before. The result is a magazine that has remained formally daring and editorially unpredictable across more than seventy issues.
The alumni list reads like a who's who of contemporary German-language literature. Former editors include Paul Brodowsky, Helene Bukowski, Juan S. Guse, Florian Kessler, Thomas Klupp, Martin Kordić, and Lisa-Maria Seydlitz — writers who went on to publish novels, win prizes, and shape the literary landscape. The magazine served as their proving ground, and the work that appeared in its pages often represented the first published writing of careers that would go on to matter considerably. Thematic issues have dedicated entire editions to young Swiss literature, the state of contemporary poetry, and other focused explorations of what German-language writing can be and do.
In 2005, the BELLA triste e.V. launched PROSANOVA, the first and largest festival for young German-language literature, held every three years in Hildesheim. The festival has become a landmark event on the literary calendar — a meeting point for emerging writers, publishers, and readers that extends the magazine's mission of platform-building into a live, communal experience. Between the magazine, the festival, the release parties in Berlin and Leipzig, and the steady stream of writers who pass through the Hildesheim programme and into the wider world, BELLA triste has become something more than a literary journal. It is infrastructure — the place where German literature goes to discover what it will become next.
Explore BELLA triste at <a href="https://www.bellatriste.de/" target="\_blank">bellatriste.de