The idea arrived in 1987, at a conference in Madrid. Katja de Bragança, a young German human geneticist whose doctoral research focused on fingerprints and Down syndrome, was watching an overhead projection when a text stopped her cold: the story of Robin Hood, written by a boy with Down syndrome. What struck her was not the subject but the style — witty, original, entirely its own thing. At the time, the medical consensus held that people with Down syndrome could not meaningfully read or write. Parents were routinely told by paediatricians that their children would never learn. De Bragança knew differently from her own research at the University of Bonn's Institute for Human Genetics, where she had met teenagers with Down syndrome who proudly showed her things they had written. She connected the two experiences, and an idea began to take shape.
Eleven years later, in 1998, with 320,000 Deutschmarks from the Volkswagen Foundation and a research position at Bonn's Institute for the History of Medicine, de Bragança turned that idea into a magazine. The name came from one of the first editorial meetings, held at an ice cream parlour in Bonn. The sun was shining, the team was sharing a large sundae, and founding member Michael Häger — overcome with happiness — spontaneously kissed editor-in-chief de Bragança on the ear. Everyone shouted "Ohrenkuss!" The explanation followed immediately: most of what you hear goes in one ear and out the other, but the important things stay inside your head — and that is an Ohrenkuss, an ear kiss.
Every text in the magazine is written or dictated by people with Down syndrome and published exactly as it was created — no corrections, no editorial smoothing. The first issue was about love. Angela Fritzen, who has been with the magazine since that very first edition, remembers it well. In the quarter-century since, more than fifty thematic issues have followed — on music, fashion, Mongolia, paradise, luxury, unicorns — each one produced by a core team of fourteen adults with Down syndrome in Bonn, supplemented by over fifty correspondents across Europe and occasionally from the United States. The editorial process involves research trips that have taken the team to the Mongolian steppe (documented in a 2006 feature in GEO), the Green Vault in Dresden, the Bauhaus model house in Weimar, the concentration camp at Buchenwald, and the shooting range of the Bonn police department. The circulation has grown from 150 copies to around 3,000, read by doctors, midwives, human geneticists, teachers, designers, photographers, and families touched by Down syndrome.
The magazine is ad-free and editorially independent. For the tenth anniversary in 2008, the team published the Ohrenkuss Wörterbuch, a dictionary-style book designed by Jennifer Skupin of KesselsKramer in Amsterdam, which was nominated for the German Federal Design Prize. De Bragança received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010 and the Golden Bild der Frau award in 2012. The magazine won the Smart Hero Award in 2019. One of its authors, Natalie Dedreux, confronted Chancellor Angela Merkel on national television during the 2017 election campaign about the abortion of foetuses with Down syndrome, and has since published a book titled Mein Leben ist doch cool. Another contributor, Yevhen Holubentsev, fled Kyiv after the Russian invasion and joined the Bonn team.
The writing in Ohrenkuss is unlike anything else in German-language media — direct, disarming, sometimes poetic, often funny, and always authentically itself. In a media landscape that endlessly debates representation, Ohrenkuss skips the discourse and goes straight to the source — handing the pen to people who were told they could never write, and discovering that what they have to say is extraordinary. David Extra, asked about his wishes for the world, put it better than most newspaper editorials manage in a thousand words: "Leave nature alone. No bombs. No giant planes. Just peace and being carefree and nature endlessly wide. And no rockets."
Explore Ohrenkuss at <a href="https://ohrenkuss.de/" target="\_blank">ohrenkuss.de