We Were Supposed to Grow Up
The first editorial in the first issue of NEON opened with a single sentence: Eigentlich sollten wir erwachsen werden.
We were supposed to grow up. Nora Tschirner looked out from the cover and that line sat underneath everything—an admission that nobody really wanted to do what was expected of them. Timm Klotzek and Michael Ebert built a German youth magazine out of that ambivalence in 2003, and for fifteen years NEON was the most honest publication I’d ever read about what being young actually felt like.
Not magazine-young. Not aspirational editorial fiction. The real version: the uncertainty, the sex that didn’t quite work out, the politics you were still assembling, the jobs that made no sense but kept you fed, the identity built from pieces that didn’t fit cleanly. Every month NEON talked to its readers as people who were allowed to be confused and still intelligent. That sounds basic but is apparently very difficult to pull off, because almost nobody else managed it.
I read each issue front to back, then back to front. The long-form reportage, the brutal honesty about bodies and money and failure, the columns by writers who hadn’t yet decided what they believed—all of it. Some of it worked its way into how I write. This journal wouldn’t look the way it does without NEON. I’m still not entirely sure if that’s a compliment or a confession.
After the slow decline everyone could see coming and nobody wanted to name, editor-in-chief Ruth Fend announced that NEON would end its print run with the June 18th issue. She wrote the farewell the way the magazine always wrote about hard things—directly, without softening. Wir würden wahnsinnig gerne weiter ein Heft für euch machen,
she wrote—we’d love nothing more than to keep making this thing. But too few readers remained. The younger generation found other companions. The ones who grew out of NEON hadn’t left enough newcomers behind them, and the economics eventually caught up with the feeling.
When I find an old NEON now—the worn kind, pages soft from rereading, spine already broken—I can see exactly what certain passages did to me at the time. Ideas that quietly reorganized something. A syntax I wanted to steal. The confidence that the things I cared about were worth treating seriously. Most magazines want to sell you something and make you feel inadequate about not having it yet. NEON wanted to sit down and talk.
The last issue comes out June 18th as a retrospective—fifteen years, one final celebration, then the move to an online-only existence in the crowded space where everything goes to find a second life or fade out quietly. There’s nobody positioned to fill the gap it leaves on a newsstand shelf. That specific shape of publication—smart without being cold, young without being stupid about it—doesn’t really exist anymore. The sentence that started it all turns out to have been a deadline. Eventually everyone grows up. Even the magazine did.