here & now

Despite the title, the new Berlin Quarterly has little to do with Berlin at first sight, besides having its offices in town. Picking up on some of the dustier and quirkier visual elements of old-fashioned literary titles, the design of Berlin Quarterly doesn’t succeed as well as The White Review in translating these into a contemporary context, but it is still a slightly odd and refreshing change to the many tiresome neo-classicist titles in the wake of Monocle.

In the tradition of the classic literary magazine, the Berlin Quarterly proposes a series of essays and fiction, on the current state of Serbia, or the state of the publishing industry being dragged into the 21st century with e-books, alongside portfolios of Ernst Haeckel’s legendary Kunstformen der Natur or a photographic series on the radical rebuilding of China’s cities by Sze Tsung Leong. And if these might seem a little haphazard at first sight, then one could argue that they all examine modern life in the throes of change and progress: a state torn between its old nationalistic ways or opening up to the world, another country that is firmly set on erasing its past, an industry that hasn’t changed its business model for decades faced with the challenges of the digital world. And change, we know a thing or two about in Berlin.