Arbitrium

About Arbitrium

Arbitrium: Germany's Dedicated Review Journal for German Literary Studies

Arbitrium — full title Arbitrium: Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft (Journal for Reviews in German Literary Studies) — is a German-language review journal devoted entirely to critical assessment of new scholarship in Germanistik, the study of German language and literature. It appears three times a year, has been published continuously since 1983, and since 2010 has been issued in Berlin by Walter de Gruyter (now presented on the De Gruyter Brill platform). Its print ISSN is 0723-2977 and its online ISSN is 1865-8849, exactly as recorded on this Journals World profile. The Latin title can be rendered in German as Schiedsspruch — an arbitral judgment — a name that captures the journal's founding purpose: to deliver considered verdicts in a field producing more books than any individual scholar can read.

Identity and Bibliographic Facts

Founding Rationale: Orientation in a Flood of Publications

Arbitrium was founded in 1983 by two prominent Germanists, Wolfgang Harms and Wolfgang Frühwald. In the preface to the first issue, the founders diagnosed a structural problem in their discipline. German literary studies, they argued, lacked a specialist journal that concentrated on reviewing — one that would offer orientation and selection through critical judgment amid the flood of scholarly literature. The balance between the volume of books the field produced and the evaluative sifting of that production was, in their words, no longer intact: important journals had reduced their review sections or concentrated exclusively on research articles, and it could no longer be taken for granted that significant new publications would be drawn into scholarly discussion through timely critical appraisal.

The publisher's present-day description of the journal restates the same mission in updated language. From the outset, De Gruyter records, Arbitrium's aim was to provide orientation and to set milestones in view of the constantly growing number of scientific publications, by means of differentiated presentation, well-founded critical assessment and reflected classification. That continuity matters: across more than four decades and three publishing houses, the journal's identity has remained stable. It is not a venue for primary research articles; it is the field's organised instrument for judging primary research after it appears.

The publication history reflects the consolidation of German academic publishing in the period. Arbitrium began with the Munich house of C. H. Beck, moved in 1989 to the Max Niemeyer Verlag in Tübingen — a publisher strongly associated with German linguistics and literary studies — and, after De Gruyter acquired Niemeyer in 2006, transferred to Walter de Gruyter in Berlin from 2010, where it has remained. Volume numbering runs continuously from 1983: the 2024 volume, for example, is volume 42, which places the journal in its fifth decade without interruption.

Scope: What Arbitrium Reviews

The journal's reviewing remit covers German literary studies in the full breadth implied by the German term Germanistik. Reviewed publications span the discipline's historical range — medieval German literature and language, early modern literature, the literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and contemporary writing — together with the methods and neighbouring concerns that Germanists work with: literary theory, editions and editorial scholarship, cultural studies approaches, and the history of the discipline itself. Citation records of individual reviews illustrate the texture of that coverage: a 2024 issue, for instance, carried a review of a volume of Bertolt Brecht interviews from 1926–1956, and earlier issues have reviewed critical editions and monographs on authors from the medieval period to the present, including work in English on German subjects where it bears on the field's conversation.

Because Arbitrium is a review journal, its "articles" are evaluations written by specialist reviewers of books and editions produced by others. The scholarly value of such a journal is cumulative and infrastructural. A single review tells a librarian whether to buy a book and a researcher whether to read it; forty volumes of reviews amount to a running, expert-filtered bibliography of German literary studies, recording which publications the field's specialists considered important, persuasive, flawed or negligible at the moment of appearance. For historians of scholarship, that record is itself primary evidence of how the discipline's priorities have shifted since 1983.

Editorial Structure

Arbitrium is edited by a board of senior Germanists rather than a single editor. As listed for 2025, the editorial board (Herausgebergremium) comprises Frieder von Ammon, Beate Kellner, Peter Strohschneider, Michael Waltenberger and Friedrich Vollhardt — scholars whose own research covers medieval and early modern literature, modern German literature and literary theory. The journal's editorial office (Redaktion) is located at the Institute for German Philology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the institution with which the founding generation of the journal was also associated. Board membership of this kind is typical of established German humanities journals: editorship is a rotating academic responsibility exercised alongside university posts, and the Munich base gives the journal a stable administrative home.

Reviews in a journal of this type are generally written by invited or volunteering specialists matched to the book under discussion, and are then edited for length, tone and consistency by the board and the Munich office. Prospective reviewers and authors of books for review should route enquiries through the publisher's journal page and the editorial office rather than expecting an open manuscript-submission pipeline of the kind research-article journals operate; the commissioning logic of a review journal is fundamentally different, since the objects of its content — newly published books — are chosen by the editors, not submitted by their authors.

Publication Model, Access and Charges

Arbitrium appears three times a year in print and online. The publisher's platform presents the complete run of issues, and De Gruyter notes that, as of 2026, journal subscriptions include access to the entire archive from volume 1, issue 1 onwards, so institutional subscribers can read the full backfile at no additional cost. Individual reviews are citable items with their own page ranges within issues — reviews are typically short, running from a few pages for a standard notice to longer review essays for major works.

The journal operates on the traditional subscription model of German humanities publishing. It is not an open-access journal, and an article processing charge for Arbitrium is not published on the publisher pages consulted for this profile; review journals of this kind do not normally charge their contributors, but anyone needing a definitive statement should obtain it from the publisher directly rather than rely on inference. Subscription prices are set by De Gruyter for print, online and combined formats and vary by institution type; current figures are published by the publisher and are not restated here, since they change annually.

Indexing and Discoverability

The publisher's journal presentation references the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), the European Science Foundation-initiated index for humanities journals, among the services associated with the title; the journal's contents are also discoverable through the publisher's own platform, through library catalogues worldwide (the title is held and catalogued internationally under both ISSNs, as university library records attest), and through the citation apparatus of German studies, where reviews are routinely cited in bibliographies and publication lists with full volume, issue and page details. Readers should not expect the bibliometric apparatus of the natural sciences here: Arbitrium has no Journal Impact Factor of the kind reported for science journals, and no such figure is published for it. Its standing is better judged by the measures that count in its field — four decades of continuous publication, a board drawn from leading chairs of German studies, and its function as a standard reviewing organ cited across the discipline.

How to Use Arbitrium as a Reader

Different readers get different value from a review journal, and it is worth being explicit about each use. For the researcher in German studies, Arbitrium is a triage instrument: scanning the reviews in each issue identifies which of the season's monographs, editions and essay collections matter, and the reviews' critical judgments flag methodological commitments and controversies before the reader commits to a book. For the librarian, it is an acquisitions guide grounded in expert assessment rather than publisher marketing. For the doctoral student, its backfile is a map of the field's recent history — which authors, periods and methods attracted attention, and how reputations were made. For the author of a scholarly book, a review in Arbitrium is a meaningful form of disciplinary recognition, because the journal's reviews are written to be argued with, not merely to summarise.

Citation practice follows the journal's bibliographic identity: cite the reviewer, the review's title or the work reviewed, Arbitrium, the year, volume and issue, and the page range, with the online ISSN 1865-8849 or print ISSN 0723-2977 as required by the citing style. Where a digital object identifier is assigned on the publisher's platform for an individual item, include it.

Assessment

Arbitrium is a durable piece of disciplinary infrastructure. Founded in 1983 on a clear-eyed diagnosis — that German literary studies produced more scholarship than its existing journals could critically process — it has performed the same essential task under three publishers for over forty years: three issues a year of expert, judgment-bearing reviews, edited from Munich by a board of the field's senior scholars and published since 2010 by De Gruyter in Berlin. Its ISSN pair (0723-2977 print; 1865-8849 online) is correctly recorded on this profile, as is its publisher. For anyone navigating new Germanistik scholarship, or reconstructing how the field evaluated itself across four decades, it remains one of the first places to look.

Inside an Issue: What an Arbitrium Review Looks Like

Concrete examples show the journal's working range better than any general description. In volume 42, issue 2 (2024), Saskia Fischer reviewed the edition Bertolt Brecht: "Unsere Hoffnung heute ist die Krise" — Interviews 1926–1956 across pages 219–221: a compact, three-page expert notice of a major documentary edition. In volume 38, issue 2 (2020), Enno Ruge reviewed Kaltërina Latifi's critical edition of August Wilhelm Schlegel's Hamlet manuscript — a review occupying the opening pages of the issue, reflecting the weight German studies assigns to editorial scholarship. In volume 40 (2022), the same reviewer assessed Peter Erwin Kofler's volume on Wieland's Shakespeare translation in its period context (pages 207–210). Three features recur across such items: the reviewer is a specialist in the precise subfield; the review evaluates the book's editorial or argumentative workmanship, not merely its topic; and the notice is short enough to be one of many in an issue, so that a single Heft surveys a whole season of production across periods — medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary — side by side.

That breadth within one issue is the journal's founding idea made visible. A medievalist reading Arbitrium encounters, alongside reviews in her own period, the considered judgments of colleagues on new work in modern literature and theory; the journal thereby performs a connective function that specialised period journals cannot, holding the discipline together as a single conversation even as its subfields multiply.

The Founders in Context

The founding editors embodied the breadth the journal sought to serve. Wolfgang Harms, a Munich Germanist, worked on the courtly romances of the high and late Middle Ages, on emblematics — he served as president of the Society for Emblem Studies from 1996 to 2002 — and on the connections between literature, natural knowledge and the history of scholarship; in 1975 he had already founded the book series Mikrokosmos: Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft und Bedeutungsforschung, and he chaired the German Research Foundation's German studies commission in the early 1980s. Wolfgang Frühwald was among the most prominent German literary scholars of his generation. That scholars of this standing designed Arbitrium as reviewing infrastructure — rather than as another outlet for articles — is itself evidence of how seriously the discipline took the problem of critical orientation in 1983, and the journal they designed has outlasted the publishing landscape in which it was conceived.

Reviewing as a Scholarly Genre

It is worth pausing on what a review journal contributes that citation counts cannot measure. A research article adds knowledge; a good review adjudicates it. Arbitrium's reviews perform three adjudicative functions. First, description with judgment: an accurate account of a book's contents joined to an explicit verdict on its success, so a reader who never opens the book still learns something reliable about it. Second, classification: placing a new publication within the field's existing debates — the "reflected classification" of the publisher's description — so that its contribution is measured against the state of the art rather than in isolation. Third, record: a dated, signed, citable judgment that later scholarship can cite, contest or confirm. The Latin title names exactly this function: an arbitrium is a judgment delivered by an appointed arbiter. In an era when evaluation of scholarship is increasingly delegated to metrics designed for the laboratory sciences, a humanities journal whose entire content is named expert judgment is a deliberate counter-model, and its survival since 1983 suggests the model retains the confidence of its discipline.

Arbitrium and the German Humanities Journal Landscape

Arbitrium sits within a dense German-language journal ecology for Germanistik that includes long-established period and general journals — some of them, ironically, among those whose shrinking review sections prompted its founding. Its distinctiveness is specialisation of function rather than of period: where a general journal divides its pages among articles, debates and a handful of reviews, Arbitrium devotes every page to reviewing, which allows it to cover far more titles per year and to commission reviewers across the whole map of the discipline. For libraries, the practical consequence is that Arbitrium complements rather than duplicates other Germanistik subscriptions; for researchers, that a book's absence from its pages over time is itself a weak signal about the book's reception. The journal's migration onto the De Gruyter Brill platform has also changed how it is used: reviews that were once consulted in bound volumes are now reached through catalogue records, citation links and the publisher's search, and are cited in scholars' publication lists with the same volume-issue-page apparatus as print.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Arbitrium?

A German-language review journal for German literary studies (Germanistik), founded in 1983. Its full title is Arbitrium: Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft, and it publishes critical reviews rather than primary research articles.

What are the ISSNs of Arbitrium?

Print ISSN 0723-2977; online ISSN 1865-8849.

Who publishes Arbitrium?

Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, since 2010. Earlier publishers were C. H. Beck (from 1983) and the Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen (1989–2009).

Who founded Arbitrium and when?

Wolfgang Harms and Wolfgang Frühwald, in 1983, to provide critical orientation and selection amid the growing volume of Germanistik publications.

How often does Arbitrium appear?

Three issues per year. Volume numbering is continuous from 1983 (volume 42 corresponds to 2024).

Who edits Arbitrium?

An editorial board listed for 2025 as Frieder von Ammon, Beate Kellner, Peter Strohschneider, Michael Waltenberger and Friedrich Vollhardt, with the editorial office at the Institut für deutsche Philologie, LMU Munich.

Is Arbitrium open access? Does it charge authors?

It is a subscription journal on the publisher's platform, with archive access included in subscriptions. An article processing charge is not published on the publisher pages consulted; direct confirmation should be sought from De Gruyter if required.

Does Arbitrium have an impact factor?

No Journal Impact Factor is published for this title. Its reputation rests on its longevity, its editorial board and its established role as a reviewing organ for German literary studies.