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Theaterjournale.at – Platform for cross-institutional research into German-language Theater Journals and Almanacs from 1750 to 1918

·         Local theater journals review a single venue’s past season and are often the only source on a theater’s artistic as well as technical personnel. Usually produced by the prompter at his or her own expense and peddled as a source for supplemental income, they were intended for local audiences and often included poems, anecdotes, or couplets.

·         Universal theater almanacs, on the other hand, list international German-speaking theater companies and their personnel in over 3,600 locations. The information was reported in the fall by the respective management to an editorial office; the almanacs and yearbooks were distributed nationwide and usually published over a longer period of time.

Paul S. Ulrich, theater scholar and librarian from Berlin, has tracked down around 7,000 journals and 400 almanacs since the 1990s, in the holdings of more than 360 libraries, archives, museums and private collections worldwide.


In cooperation with the  Don Juan Archive Vienna, he makes his impressive collection of originals and reproductions available in the "Theaterpublizistik digital" project, and he provides the bibliographical data via this online catalogue:

Search for theater journals and almanacs

… which are available digitally via the catalogs of the owning institutions.

… which can be viewed in the digital archive of the Don Juan Archive Vienna.

… which so far were only proven bibliographically as desiderata

Publication Series

Paul S. Ulrich's evaluations of the content of the theater journals and almanacs are also published in printed form: the series Topographie und Repertoire des Theaters is published by the Hollitzer Verlag, the volume Wiener Theater (1752–1918) is dedicated to the Viennese theater landscape.

Three more volumes were published in November 2022:
In the bibliography of the local theater journals (volume I), Paul S. Ulrich indexes arount 7,000 theater journals from the period 1772-1918 bibliographically. Volume II presents the editors togehter with selected theater lwas for prompters as well as poems and prose texts included in the journals by this professional group. Volume III documents the printed schedules printed in theater journals and almanacs: a directory of the repertoires arranged according to chronology, topography and direction.

More information about the series and other planned volumes here.

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