In 1993, in the small town of Bad Bederkesa in Lower Saxony, two high-school students named Martin Brinkmann and Fabian Reimann decided to start a literary magazine. They were, by Brinkmann's own description, "general-oppositionell gesinnt" — opposed on principle to the mainstream, to the established, to the typical bloodless German literary establishment, which they did not yet actually know. They read horror novels. They wanted to see the world differently. They called their magazine KRACHKULTUR — crash culture, noise culture — and began publishing.
More than three decades later, twenty-one issues deep, KRACHKULTUR is one of the most respected literary journals in the German-speaking world. Die Zeit called it the origin point of literature itself; the FAZ declared it a beacon; Rolling Stone described it as essential reading for anyone sick of the bloodless wellness literature of our age; Cicero named it Germany's cheekiest literary magazine. Brinkmann, who went on to earn a doctorate with a 700-page dissertation on music and melancholy in the work of Heimito von Doderer, now edits the journal from a flat in Munich's Haidhausen neighbourhood.
The magazine's track record of discovery is extraordinary. KRACHKULTUR published the first German text by Saša Stanišić, the first poems by Anja Utler and Henning Ahrens, the first uncut German translation of Raymond Carver, the first German-language publication of the allegedly untranslatable Garielle Lutz. It brought Richard Yates to German readers before the Leonardo DiCaprio film made him fashionable. It unearthed a lost Charles Bukowski poem, unpublished letters by Jörg Fauser, and unknown texts by Doderer. Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Karen Duve, Peter Stamm, Martin Mosebach, H.P. Lovecraft, Maggie Nelson, Edward Limonov — the contributors list reads like an alternative canon of world literature, assembled by editors who value the uncomfortable truth over the comfortable lie.
Each issue is thematic — rausch, heimat, sexism, the fantastic — and each is a gamble. Rotziger trash sits alongside high-minded lyric; teenage horror stories end in places no reader expected. The cover of issue twelve, devoted to the uncanny, was coated in luminescent material and glowed in the dark. It is funded in part by the German Literature Fund and published irregularly, because Brinkmann will not publish until the issue is ready. KRACHKULTUR, as the Weser-Kurier observed, does not make noise. It glows.
Explore KRACHKULTUR at <a href="http://www.krachkultur.de/" target="\_blank">krachkultur.de