The name is a postcode. 39 followed by three zeros are the opening digits of every postal code in South Tyrol — except Bolzano's. It is the kind of detail that only someone who has left a place would notice, the sort of geographical shorthand that lodges in your brain the moment you start writing your old address on envelopes sent from somewhere else. In this case, somewhere else was Berlin.
39NULL was founded in 2013 by a group of South Tyrolean expatriates living in the German capital. Martin Santner served as editor-in-chief, Lukas Marsoner as publisher, Julia Egger as art director, with Barbara Weithaler, Martina Wunderer, and Verena Wisthaler completing the founding team. They had all arrived in Berlin for the same reasons young creatives from small places usually do: more space for ideas, more people to exchange them with, a cost of living that had not yet become absurd. But unlike most expatriate projects, 39NULL did not look inward at the diaspora. It looked back home.
The first issue was titled Kommen, Bleiben, Gehen — Coming, Staying, Leaving — and it tackled the creative brain drain from South Tyrol head-on. Why do the best-educated, most internationally minded young South Tyrolean creatives leave? What happens to the places they leave behind? And what happens to them once they arrive somewhere else? These are not questions unique to the Alpine provinces of northern Italy, but 39NULL asked them with a specificity and a tenderness that made the universal feel deeply local.
The second issue, Das Fremde — The Foreign, The Strange — featured around thirty contributors including established South Tyrolean literary voices like Joseph Zoderer, Ulrich Ladurner, and Roberta Dapunt. It explored the experience of foreignness in a region that has always been caught between linguistic and cultural worlds: German-speaking, Italian-administered, Austrian in memory, European by circumstance. The third issue, Macht und Ohnmacht — Power and Powerlessness — was crowdfunded on Startnext, as were its predecessors. A fourth issue on the theme of Erinnerung (Memory) followed in 2018, exploring how personal and collective recollection shapes identity in a region where the past is never simple.
Each issue ran to roughly 120 to 148 pages, published in German, Italian, and English, with a print run of around 1,000 copies. The design changed with every edition — Julia Egger treated each issue as its own visual project, a decision that kept the magazine feeling fresh but also reflected a publication that was still searching for itself, still working out what it wanted to be. The ZEITmagazin and the Süddeutsche Zeitung both took notice, which gave the small team the kind of validation that actually translated into sales.
What made 39NULL more interesting than yet another beautiful indie magazine from Berlin was its insistence on treating a small place with big-magazine seriousness. South Tyrol, for all its postcard beauty and UNESCO-listed Dolomites, has a media landscape that Santner himself described as dominated by a single large publishing house that made it nearly impossible for new voices to establish themselves. 39NULL was the antidote: independent, multilingual, politically non-aligned, and staffed entirely by people who loved the region enough to be honest about it. The magazine was published by their cultural association kognitiv, founded in Latsch in the Vinschgau valley in 2011, which also organised events, screenings, and exhibitions back home.
It is the particular fate of magazines like 39NULL to be made by people who care more about the subject than the sustainability of the business model. Crowdfunding works beautifully for the first few issues, then becomes its own exhausting project. But in its short, intense life, 39NULL did something remarkable: it proved that a place with 530,000 inhabitants tucked between the Alps and the Italian border could produce a magazine that belonged in any international bookshop — and that the people best equipped to make it were the ones who had left.