Between 1880 and 1938 the number and dominance of publicly speaking writers in Austro-German culture rose enormously. This book is the first to look at the many speeches delivered by authors in this period and to consider the writer’s speech as a genre in its own right. Probing the genre as a central mode of communication employed by intellectuals in the public space, the book lays bare the institutional as well as media (radio, newspapers, magazines) constellations in which speeches figured. It comes with web access to an index of over 1,400 speeches by 123 authors as well as instructive statistics.