Sascha Ehlert was born in Berlin in 1987, studied German literature, English, and political science at the University of Potsdam, and worked as a freelance music journalist for Juice, Spex, and the taz before founding Das Wetter — Magazin für Text und Musik in October 2013. He was 26. The title means “the weather,” and Ehlert chose it because weather is universal, ever-present, and timeless — the opposite of the digital zeitgeist that print can never compete with. Alongside him from the very beginning was Katharina Holzmann, a trained educator turned literary editor and proofreader, who became the magazine’s co-pilot and later co-founded the Korbinian Verlag publishing house with Ehlert and David Rabolt.
The early years were brutal. Ehlert worked full-time while assembling the magazine on weekends; Holzmann was still studying. Neither earned anything from the project. They launched in the middle of what the German media industry called “the great magazine death” — Spex, Intro, and dozens of other titles folded around them. Das Wetter survived. By 2023, it was selling 5,000 copies per quarter, had outlasted every German music magazine of its generation, and Felix Stephan of Die Literarische Welt had called it a style-defining organ for aesthetic contemporaneity. In 2014, it won the HANS — Hamburg Music Prize for Media Format of the Year.
The magazine is quarterly, published from Berlin, and covers pop culture, literature, theatre, and music with equal seriousness. It was inspired by Der Freund, the legendary journal by Christian Kracht and Eckhart Nickel, but quickly found its own voice: younger, more diverse, and insistent that hip-hop and literary fiction belong in the same publication. In 2023, Kiepenheuer & Witsch published Das Wetter Buch für Text und Musik, a 10th-anniversary anthology collecting the best writing from thirty issues — an almost unheard-of honour for a small independent magazine. The motto printed since issue one still holds: Es kann nur besser werden — it can only get better.
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