This introduction conceptualizes reportage/literary-reportage/literary journalism (Reportage/-literatur) as a genre of intervention that works from liminal positions between journalistic fact and literary imagination, using border-crossings to expose thresholds, enable transitions, and open counter-publics. By sketching a genealogy from the beginnings in travel literature to the heyday of reportage in the 1920 s, it shows how the reportage oscillates between media systems and social fields, foregrounding its power to narrate (social) conflicts and to empower.