Fanzines as Media of the Punk Movement   “A Window to Another World”

The German punk scene of the late 1970s was a contradictory mix: artists formed bands, writers penned song lyrics, filmmakers experimented with music, and fans published magazines and became musicians themselves. What united them was their rejection of a society in West Germany that was perceived as staid and conservative. The goal was to break through this order through provocation and a new aesthetic of harshness and ugliness.  
 

Scenes are only as strong as the places where they emerge. The still relatively small punk scene gathered night after night in the few bars and clubs on Ratinger Straße in Düsseldorf, in the Karolinenviertel in Hamburg, or in Schöneberg and Kreuzberg in Berlin. The Ratinger Hof in Düsseldorf was one of the most important meeting places for punks and artists in the late 1970s. It was here that Gabriel Delgado-Lopez and Robert Görl of D.A.F. first met. The painter Martin Kippenberger, who temporarily ran the SO36 scene hangout in Berlin, frequented the place and was fascinated by the intensity of the concerts. He brought bands like DIN A Testbild and Mania D to his club. Peter Hein of Fehlfarben and Franz Bielmeier of Mittagspause were also regulars at the Ratinger Hof. They met at a record store in Düsseldorf and, infected by the punk virus from England, went on to co-create the fanzine The Ostrich.

The concept of “Do-It-Yourself” and the Fanzine “The Ostrich”  

Fanzines are self-published magazines created by fans that played a pivotal role in the emergence of the punk scene in the late 1970s. They were not only media outlets where people wrote about and debated punk, but also created their own public spheres beyond the established music press. Fanzines served as platforms for bringing like-minded people together and shaped the taste and style of the punk scene.
 
While pop fans in the UK and the U.S. had already become pop critics, such voices were lacking in Germany. Aside from the music magazine Sounds, there were hardly any media outlets that covered punk. The media portrayal of punk in mainstream newspapers and magazines tended to be scandal-oriented. When spaces and media are lacking, you create them yourself. The lack of infrastructure or purely pragmatic things like money almost inevitably led to the “do-it-yourself” (DIY) principle in the punk scene of the 1970s, even though the term wasn’t yet in common use in Germany. Back then, it was called “independent”—a small island within capitalism. Through the DIY ethos, anyone could express themselves artistically. The focus was not on perfection, but on the urge to participate and share. Established boundaries between producers and consumers, between stars and fans, began to crumble: Bands released their own records and founded their own labels. They organized their own concerts, printed flyers and posters, or produced their own fanzines. In principle, any fan could become an author and generate pop-cultural significance. This gave rise to new economies and infrastructures under self-determined conditions that guaranteed the greatest possible independence from the established cultural establishment and the music industry.  

Fanzines were made by scene members for scene members. Anyone who made a fanzine didn’t just report on the scene—they were part of it and helped shape it. They documented concerts, discussed records, and published interviews. Through the exchange of issues, a network emerged that connected scenes in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and Berlin. Fanzines drew on scene-specific knowledge that was irrelevant or even incomprehensible to people outside the scene, and appeared in a wide variety of formats: as photocopied or printed booklets, on video and audio cassettes. They were distributed in empty beer cans or film canisters, in homemade cloth bags, or in specially crafted envelopes. Fanzines were created out of personal initiative and passion, not primarily for commercial reasons.
  The first German punk fanzine was published in Düsseldorf in 1977 and was called The Ostrich. The idea for it originated during a phone call between Ramon Luis and his school friend Franz Bielmeier, who would later become the singer and lyricist for Mittagspause. The Ostrich became the voice of the German punk scene. For the first issue, with a print run of 50 copies, individual pages were photocopied and stapled together. Luis and Bielmeier designed the black-and-white layout themselves—a collage of photocopies, handwritten additions, and cut-out images. It was precisely this imperfection that became the antithesis of the professional design of established magazines. Later, the fanzine was distributed in record stores in Cologne and Düsseldorf and reached a circulation of 300 copies. Peter Hein, Gabi Delgado, and Ralf Dörper (later of Die Krupps) joined as contributors. Whether scene gatherings, concerts, records, movies, performances, literature, demonstrations, or everyday experiences: events from the punk scene were recounted in a radically subjective manner and imbued with provocative symbolism and a new aesthetic of raw intensity. This brought topics to the forefront that had previously played no role in the German music press. The Ostrich also served as a testing ground for the editors and a stage for their own self-presentation as pop stars. After eight regular issues and the end of the first punk phase, the fanzine was discontinued in 1979. The Ostrich is considered the prototype for subsequent fanzines such as Der Arsch, White Riot, and Heimatblatt.  

Fanzines as a “Window to Another World”  

Self-published punk fanzines flourished rapidly in pop-cultural niches. By the early 1980s, estimates suggest there were more than three hundred punk fanzines in West Germany alone. Photocopying technology contributed to this development. It allowed the entire print run of a fanzine to be produced quickly and at low cost using photocopiers in offices or copy shops. Since the advent of the Internet, the significance of fanzines has increasingly been complemented by digital forms of publication. While “e-zines” and “webzines”—and later, blogs—became established in the 1990s, social media now serves as the space for communication within scenes. Whether on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook: every band has its own profile, concert experiences are posted, and events are announced. Today, digital platforms enable fast and cost-effective networking worldwide. At the same time, every post is subject to the platform operators’ economic logic of monetization. The creators of fanzines like The Ostrich were more independent in their “do-it-yourself” approach: they created their own public spheres with their own infrastructure. In doing so, they opened “a window to another world” and not only made the punk movement visible but also actively contributed to the formation of the scene.