In 2004, journalist Markus Huber had what he describes as a crazy idea: make a magazine he would actually want to read. It should cover art and culture, politics and society, with a certain lifestyle that defied easy categorisation. Good stories, striking photography, unexpected design. He called it Fleisch — German for meat, or flesh — a name as deliberately blunt and ambiguous as the magazine itself. Twenty years and more than seventy-six issues later, the publication sits in Vienna’s second district and belongs to no one but itself.
Every issue of Fleisch is monothematic. A single subject determines not just the content but the form: one issue might read like a book, another like a calendar; one might consist entirely of text, the next entirely of images. Recent editions have tackled fear in Austria, the art of elegant failure, moral dilemmas, the phenomenon of staying home, and a 174-page anniversary issue described simply as journalism the way the editors wish it existed. An issue-length interview with novelist Thomas Glavinic. A deep dive into Sebastian Kurz by fifteen different writers. Minigolf as metaphor. The approach is always the same: find a theme that is current enough to matter but strange enough to surprise, then let the form follow the function.
Monocle named Fleisch one of eight media houses worldwide to keep on your radar. The German media journal V.i.s.d.P. called it perhaps the best magazine in the German language. The publication has won prizes for its writing, its photography, and its art direction, and has expanded into corporate publishing — including WALD, a nature magazine produced in cooperation with Austria’s federal forests. But the core identity remains what it was in 2004: a Viennese magazine that refuses to be pinned down, built on the conviction that the most interesting stories are the ones nobody else is telling, presented in a form nobody else would choose.
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