The magazine that became Almost started life as Almost 30 — a title that captured the particular anxiety of a generation stuck between the expectations of adulthood and the reality of not feeling remotely grown up. Marie Krutmann, Karina Elm, Hannah Calma, and a small Berlin-based team of six, backed by a network of international contributors, crowdfunded the first issue on Startnext. The question it posed was disarmingly honest: who says that being thirty means being a grown-up? The answer, across four issues and counting, has been nobody, and that’s fine.
Published from Berlin with a deliberately 1970s-inspired design, Almost is a multilingual magazine — texts appear in German or English without translation, side by side — that gives emerging creatives from around the world a platform. Every contribution gets its own personalised layout, so that the visual diversity of the magazine mirrors the diversity of its contributors. Issue three, the Secret Issue, hosted stories about racism, single-shaming, breakups, and other intimate topics told without moralising. Issue four, the Space Issue, collected 28 illustrated texts, poems, and personal essays circling around space in all its meanings: personal space in relationships, outer space, the spaces we inhabit, the space we all need.
In 2023, five years after the first crowdfunded print run, the team formalised their operation into Almost Publishing — an independent, women-led publishing house dedicated to giving “Schreib-Rookies,” bold newcomers and strong voices, a print platform. Their debut novel, Pola Schneemelcher’s Dümpeln, was again crowdfunded through Startnext. The model is consistent: newcomers are involved not just in writing but in every stage of the process, from editing and cover design to distribution and marketing strategy.
Almost is a community for those who want to go their own way together — a phrase that sounds like a contradiction until you read the magazine and realise it is the only honest description of what it feels like to be creative, multilingual, and not quite where you expected to be by now.
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