Hannah’s Letter

We were sitting on a park bench reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung out loud when Leni found it, about a week after we’d bought the paper that morning. We were laughing so hard that people were actually annoyed at us, which only made it funnier. Hannah Lühmann had written about this blog. She called it the Bild newspaper of the hipsters and just went from there directly into this architecture-adjacent disgust—how we were derivative, epigones, how we’d borrowed this exhausted-but-horny energy from Vice and never had a real thought about anything. We fixated on celebrity breasts. We had these stupid headlines about crystal meth and other people’s dogs and whether Nazis should be allowed to keep the swastika because it’s actually about love and peace. When she laid it out like that, it was pretty indefensible.

The thing is, she wasn’t entirely wrong, and I could feel it even being defensive about it. She’d identified something true about the formula we were running: good photographs, fun facts about famous people, that intimate voice saying you and I know something the world doesn’t, a lot of naked skin, and then these occasional gestures toward political commentary that usually weren’t worth the attention. She was right that it was formulaic. She was right that there wasn’t much underneath. What bothered me more than the criticism was that I couldn’t argue with it, and I wanted to. I wanted to write her back—something careful and considered that would prove her wrong or at least make her understand what we were actually trying to do. But it would have been a lie. There was no careful answer. We were just running on momentum and formula, and we knew it.

I never wrote the letter because I didn’t have time. For weeks before that, all through August, Leni and I had been destroying ourselves on a relaunch. We’d moved into a place together in Berlin about six months earlier, converted the kitchen into a workspace, and decided we needed to actually work together, not just as casual collaborators but as a real team. The deadline was September 1st, marked in red on the calendar like a threat. We were barely sleeping, eating pizza, writing until our hands hurt. Everything we’d built needed to be restructured, redesigned, reimagined. There was no time for a thoughtful response to Hannah Lühmann or anyone else. There was only the work.

Maybe if I’d had time, I would have realized something that I know now: whether she was right didn’t matter as much as the fact that we were too busy to care. We were chasing something, and the chasing had become its own point. The thinking had stopped being part of it. We were just pushing forward because that’s what we did. The criticism didn’t change anything because we didn’t have the space to let it. We just kept moving.

Years later, I don’t think about Hannah Lühmann much, but sometimes—on some cold autumn evening when the squirrels are moving frantically between branches and the yellow leaves are falling—I remember a conversation we had in a café in Neukölln. Just ordinary conversation. Life, love, the usual things. And then I think about her name in the newspaper, printed in black on white, surrounded by all that bitterness and disappointment between the lines. I remember thinking about it and then folding the paper and putting it in the trash.

Hannah. I’ve always liked that name. There’s something about it. Even now, when I can barely remember what the whole thing was actually about—the bench, Leni laughing, me being defensive but also knowing she’d touched something real—I keep coming back to just that. Her name.