Deef, Franzi, and Nine Others
The German internet in 2009 had pockets of genuine life in it—people writing not because someone told them to build a personal brand, but because they had things to say and the particular mild insanity required to say them publicly and keep going. End of the year feels like the right time to name some of them.
Deef Pirmasens, who writes at Gefühlskonserve, has been at this long enough to have earned the permanent respect of anyone who takes games and reading seriously. He’s in Munich, he podcasts, he reads obsessively, and there’s a warmth in his writing that you can’t fake. You either have it or you don’t. He does, and that’s not nothing after years of doing this.
Neslisah at NESNES.DE is in Istanbul—possibly voluntarily—writing about music and photography under the self-declared titles of singer, actress, model, and chief executive of the NESNES Company, a global enterprise I’ve been unable to locate on any stock exchange. The specific confidence required to be all of these things simultaneously, documented publicly, is its own form of performance art.
Thilo at Hasencore drinks too much, can’t stop thinking about pornography, and is clearly still hung up on his ex Liz. He writes about all of it with a directness that functions as its own strange journalism. Sex, tits, daily irritations, things the morally cautious don’t put on the internet. I find the whole package deeply relatable and would rather not examine why too closely.
The Pimpettes are a group of seven women who blog semi-anonymously behind black bars across their faces, and compared to them this journal is a church bingo evening. Ines, Kaethe, Tanja, Ina, Kati, Ginette, and Marion have assembled something genuinely transgressive—explicit content, fashion for pussies, a sustained argument that organized religion can go fuck itself. I mean that as a compliment, delivered sincerely.
Alex Hauck at C33 posts large-format entries about music videos and exhibitions and the occasional genuinely strange image, with an eye for design that makes you realize attention is most of the work. His brother Hotzen runs his own design blog, and clearly the family was issued extra creative capacity at birth.
Woxy and Laura at THEFUCKINGFUCKS are two women who make fashion look like something worth caring about, while also looking extraordinary themselves, which makes it significantly harder to argue with them. I’ll be straightforward: I’m at least a little in love with both of them. That’s already been established.
The zauberhafte Elv is in Berlin, where the fashion scene has migrated and where it probably belongs. She has original ideas and genuine style, which is rarer than it should be in a city full of people photographing themselves in interesting combinations of clothing.
Maria at ♥ parti curates a Tumblr that mixes beautiful things, filthy things, and funny things in exactly the proportions that make you realize those three categories overlap more than people admit. More cock pictures, please. I mean that constructively.
The pair behind Münchens Lieblingslied—two students who run through Munich pulling well-dressed strangers in front of a camera to ask what song they love right now—have a simple idea executed with the kind of genuine enthusiasm that makes simple ideas land. Munich contains more interesting people than its reputation implies.
And then there’s Franzi at Indigoidian. Twenty-four, somewhere in the depths of rural North Hesse, typing out quotes and stories and the specific category of content that more careful people don’t commit to the internet. I’ve been reading her for months. I’ve already bought my train ticket to the far end of Germany. She knows what she does to people, and I mean all of that with complete sincerity and zero ambiguity about my intentions.