Der Freund was a literary magazine

Literary magazine

A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...

 published by Axel Springer AG

Axel Springer AG

Axel Springer AG is one of the largest multimedia companies in Europe, with more than 11,500 employees and with annual revenues of about €2.9 billion. The Company is active in a total of 36 countries, including Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia and Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland...

. It was produced by Christian Kracht

Christian Kracht

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist and journalist.-Early life:Kracht was born in Saanen. His father, Christian Kracht Sr., was chief representative for the Axel Springer publishing company in the 1960s. Kracht attended Schule Schloss Salem in Baden and Lakefield College School in Ontario, Canada...

 (publisher) and Eckhart Nickel

Eckhart Nickel

Eckhart Nickel is a German author and journalist.Nickel was born in Frankfurt am Main. After studying art history and literature in Heidelberg and New York City, he worked at various media outlets including the German lifestyle magazine Tempo, Arte television in Strasbourg, and Architectural Digest...

 (editor-in-chief) in Kathmandu, Nepal

Nepal

Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...

.

Der Freund appeared every three months, with a total of eight editions between September 2004 and June 2006. Its visual style was elaborate, with artistic designs and arcane illustrations, and its range of (often light-hearted) material included essays, short stories, literary miniatures, poems, opinion columns and in-depth interviews. Most pieces were in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, but occasionally English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 or French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

.

Authors published in Der Freund included Julia Franck

Julia Franck

Julia Franck is a German writer.In 1978 Julia Franck and her family moved to West Berlin and later to Schleswig-Holstein. She studied German Literature and American Studies at the Free University of Berlin and spent some time in the United States, Mexico and Guatemala...

, Albert Hofmann

Albert Hofmann

Albert Hofmann was a Swiss scientist known best for being the first person to synthesize, ingest and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide . He authored more than 100 scientific articles and a number of books, including LSD: My Problem Child...

, Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma

Buruma is a nephew of the English film director John Schlesinger, a series of interviews with whom he published in book form.-Works:*The Japanese Tattoo with Donald Richie ISBN 978-0-8348-0228-5...

, Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac is an American contemporary artist internationally recognized for his interactive net installations and his bio-art. Kac was born in 1962, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He lives and works in Chicago....

, Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas

Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA. Koolhaas studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam, at the Architectural...

, Reinhold Messner

Reinhold Messner

Reinhold Messner is an Italian mountaineer and explorer from Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol "whose astonishing feats on Everest and on peaks throughout the world have earned him the status of the greatest climber in history." He is renowned for making the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without...

, Ira Cohen

Ira Cohen

Ira Cohen was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker.Cohen lived in Morocco and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life...

, Momus, Ingo Niermann

Ingo Niermann

Ingo Niermann is a German novelist, writer, and artist.-Biography:Niermann studied philosophy in Berlin, where he is still based and to the eastern part of which he allegedly moved as early as late 1989.-Publications:...

, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...

, Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...

, and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

. Notable illustrators were Neue Slowenische Kunst

Neue Slowenische Kunst

Neue Slowenische Kunst , aka NSK, is a controversial political art collective that announced itself in Slovenia in 1984, when Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. NSK's name, being German, is compatible with a theme in NSK works: the complicated relationship Slovenes have had with Germans...

 and Fischli & Weiss. The magazine also reprinted pieces by major writers such as Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

 and Truman Capote

Truman Capote

Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...

 under licence. Interviewees included Albert Hofmann

Albert Hofmann

Albert Hofmann was a Swiss scientist known best for being the first person to synthesize, ingest and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide . He authored more than 100 scientific articles and a number of books, including LSD: My Problem Child...

, Stanisław Lem, David Lynch

David Lynch

David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...

 and Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....

.

Der Freund was critically acclaimed for its design and cover pages, and won two awards in 2006: a bronze award from the Art Directors Club of Germany for magazine design, and the gold prize for "cover of the year" from the LeadAcademy in Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

.

External links

• Official website
• "Souplesse Royale" – Review of Der Freund by Harald Martenstein
  Harald Martenstein
  Harald Martenstein is a German journalist and author.- Biography :Martenstein studied History and Romance Studies in Freiburg. From 1981 to 1988, he was a journalist at the Stuttgarter Zeitung and from 1988 to 1997 he was a journalist at Tagesspiegel in Berlin...
  
   in Der Tagesspiegel
  Der Tagesspiegel
  Der Tagesspiegel is a classical liberal German daily newspaper...
  
  , 24 September 2004.
• "Obituary" for Der Freund in Der Tagesspiegel
  Der Tagesspiegel
  Der Tagesspiegel is a classical liberal German daily newspaper...
  
  , 18 April 2006.