Benjamin Fredrich was born in 1987 in Greifswald, a small university city in the northeastern corner of Germany — the kind of place where, as he would later put it, nobody thought a magazine could be built. He grew up in nearby Wusterhusen, trained as a competitive runner, studied political science and history, and in 2015, while still a student, founded KATAPULT with twenty thousand euros of debt and no journalistic training whatsoever. The idea was simple and, at the time, slightly absurd: a popular science magazine that would explain the world exclusively through maps, infographics, and data visualization.
The early months were funded by an EXIST startup grant from the German government, which gave Fredrich and his small team their first reliable salaries. When the grant ended, two team members left. The eighteen months that followed were, by Fredrich's account, brutal. But KATAPULT survived, and then it thrived — in large part because the maps it published on social media went viral with a regularity that no business plan could have predicted. A map of döner kebab distribution across Germany, a visualization of income inequality, a graphic showing which countries recognize which other countries: these were shared millions of times, and each share brought new subscribers to the print edition.
By 2020, Fredrich had built a publishing house around the magazine: a book imprint that produced over sixty titles, a regional newspaper called Katapult MV that aimed to challenge the dominant local press in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a refugee shelter in a converted school building in Greifswald, and — after Russia's invasion of Ukraine — an entire Ukrainian journalism project. He paid every employee the same salary, including himself: 3,400 euros gross. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about the founding of KATAPULT called Die Redaktion, in which he cast himself as the chaotic, profane, relentlessly driven protagonist of his own improbable success story.
The expansion nearly killed the enterprise. In September 2023, KATAPULT announced it was on the verge of insolvency, with a deficit of 450,000 euros. Unprofitable projects were cut, and a wave of donations and new subscriptions pulled the magazine back from the brink. Fredrich himself had already stepped down as editor-in-chief in early 2023 following critical reporting about the management of the Ukraine project. The controversy was messy, public, and entirely in character for a publication that has never believed in doing things quietly.
What remains, beneath the drama, is a magazine unlike any other in the German-speaking world — sharp, funny, rigorously sourced, and capable of making a map of parliamentary fistfights around the globe feel like the most important thing you'll read all week. KATAPULT calls itself, with characteristic self-irony, a magazine for "ice cream, cartography, and social science." The description is only partly a joke. The rest is dead serious.
Explore KATAPULT at <a href="https://katapult-magazin.de/" target="\_blank">katapult-magazin.de