Manuela Heberer is a freelance journalist from Schwerin who spent four years away from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern before returning home with a conviction: the region had stories that nobody was telling. For over a decade she had been reporting on people and places across the state, and the encounters kept accumulating — artists living in abandoned farmhouses, entrepreneurs reviving small-town economies, communities building something from what others had written off. In 2021, she turned that accumulation into VielSehn, a print magazine devoted to the Mecklenburgische Seenplatte, Germany's largest district by area: over 5,000 square kilometres of lakes, rivers, and open land stretching from the Müritz region to the Uckermark border.
The name is a play on words — "viel sehen" means "to see a lot," and the magazine's founding premise is that there is far more to see in this corner of northeastern Germany than the clichés of beautiful coastline and far-right politics would suggest. Heberer works alongside photographer Georg Hundt from Wismar, whose large-format images are given generous space across the magazine's hundred pages, and designer Antje Siggelkow, who turns their reporting into a publication with production values unusual for a regional title. The team researches everything themselves, visiting the people who live on the land, the initiatives building community, the craftspeople, producers, and creative minds who have chosen to stay or to return.
VielSehn is distributed nationally through German railway station bookshops and is available at newsstands across Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hamburg, Berlin, and Brandenburg. A Startnext crowdfunding campaign helped secure the magazine's continuation, drawing support from subscribers across Germany — many of them in Berlin, drawn to exactly the kind of stories that metropolitan media tends to overlook. For a region that often makes headlines for the wrong reasons, VielSehn offers a corrective: not by ignoring problems, but by showing the people who are doing something about them.
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