Two Desks Somewhere Near Kreuzberg

At some point the improvised setup stops being a charming detail of independent publishing and becomes a logistical problem. That point arrived around spring 2011, when Wenke and I found ourselves genuinely needing two actual desks—in a real building, with working internet, somewhere around Kreuzberg or Mitte—to do the daily work of running this journal without someone in the hallway asking us to apply lotion.

The thing about running something independently is that the infrastructure question never fully resolves. You can think and write about editorial voice and cultural commentary all you want, but eventually the question is: where are you physically sitting, and is the connection holding. We’d been operating from a setup that looks functional until it suddenly isn’t, and it had stopped looking functional.

Berlin has answers for problems like this, eventually. We found something. What I remember most about that stretch is not the solution but the hustle before it—asking agencies if they had a spare corner, getting politely steered toward collaboration opportunities that turned out to mean free content in exchange for a hot desk. The actual cost of running an independent website, never once visible in the work itself.