Norman, Isabelle, and Twenty-Eight Willing Accomplices

The thing about the Berlin creative scene around 2010 was that everyone was doing everything at once. Writing here, shooting there, appearing at some album launch on a Wednesday and reviewing it somewhere by Friday. Norman Röhlig and Isabelle Pohl were exactly that kind of people—contributing to Welt Online and a string of smaller digital platforms, logging the cultural moment from the inside, moving through fashion events and music shows and gallery openings with the practiced ease of people who have decided that experience is the job.

Their project I-ref launched with a stated mission of putting individuals at the center of stories—the people behind the narratives, not just the events themselves. As editorial propositions go, it reads a little like a manifesto drafted after two drinks and a heated argument about what journalism is supposed to do, but the impulse was genuine. In a moment when aggregation had basically won and the hot take was the dominant currency, a platform committed to actual profiles of actual human beings felt like a worthwhile position to stake out.

The roster they assembled was impressive enough to take seriously: Deniz and Dori from lil.bit, Clemens from iGNANT, the model Luise Müller-Hofstede among twenty-eight contributors in total. When you put that many people with genuine things to say into the same project, the odds of producing something worth reading are decent. Whether the vision would crystallize into something sharp enough to matter—that was the question nobody could answer at launch.

I miss that energy, honestly. Twenty-eight people deciding together that online publishing deserves serious effort, that the digital magazine still has room for something beyond content. The attempt itself said something about that particular moment in Berlin, whatever came after.