The idea came over a glass of wine in March 2013, just before the German federal election. Franziska Teubert and Alexander Sängerlaub — both alumni of the Freie Universität Berlin's communications programme — realized that none of the political magazines on the market spoke to their generation: politically interested twenty- and thirty-somethings who cared about democracy, surveillance, and the future of work but felt alienated by the dry institutional tone of existing political media. They decided to make their own. It took two years. In September 2015, they presented Kater Demos for the first time at Indiecon, the German independent magazine festival in Hamburg.
The name is a bilingual pun: "Kater" is German for both hangover and tomcat, while "Demos" is the Greek word for the people. The subtitle — "Das utopische Politikmagazin" — was not a joke. Every issue of Kater Demos was monothematic: 120 pages devoted to a single subject, explored not just through conventional analysis but through what the editors called constructive journalism — an approach that documented the problem and then asked what might be done about it. The first issue tackled democracy. Subsequent editions addressed work, media, surveillance, and the concept of the foreign. Each took roughly six months to produce, assembled by an entirely volunteer editorial team of over fifty people.
The magazine carried no advertising whatsoever — a radical position in German publishing. The founders paid for the first print run of 2,000 copies out of their own pockets and turned to Startnext, the German crowdfunding platform, to finance what came next. Sängerlaub, whose grandfather had been a banking official in the GDR who never joined the party and taught his grandson to question everything, brought a blend of critical thinking and genuine optimism that defined the magazine's tone. The design was bold and illustration-heavy, and the writing ranged from deeply researched essays to personal commentary in a section called "Denkarium," where team members shared their own small utopias.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung, W&V, and Der Freitag all praised the project. Bernie Sanders, someone joked, would read it if he spoke German. But a volunteer-run, ad-free, crowdfunded political magazine is a structurally fragile thing, and in 2019, after five issues and five years, the team shut down. The domain now redirects to a parking page. What Kater Demos left behind is proof that Germany's Generation Y was capable of building exactly the kind of political media it said it wanted — sharp, beautiful, independent, and utterly unsustainable.
Explore the legacy of Kater Demos at <a href="http://katerdemos.de/" target="\_blank">katerdemos.de