Hello and welcome to "The 5%".
We have noticed that there is a lack here in Berlin of a really good alternative magazine written in English, despite the fact that English is almost certainly the second language of Berlin (perhaps aside from Turkish) and the place is jam-packed with English-speakers of a creative bent, looking to find their way in a vast and sometimes forbidding city. We figured that it might be a nice idea to try to do something about that, and so the idea of "The 5%" was born.
The title spawns from a conversation in which it was suggested, admittedly with tongue in cheek, that you're going to be lucky if you can find 5% of the people in the world with whom you can find any sort of meaningful connection whatsoever. We therefore humbly ask for your written or visual contributions towards a magazine that will attempt to reach out to other like-minded souls, to your own 5%, and to entertain, inform and stimulate in equal measure.
The idea is to create a magazine that serves as an outlet for creative people who wish to put some of their ideas/stories/poems/rambling notions and other such bits and pieces into the public domain. Ideally we would like to provide a place for visual art as well as written work, although that will depend to a great extent on printing costs and compatibility with the format of the magazine. As far as the style and content of what will be in the magazine is concerned, that will be in large part up to you lot. Please feel free to send us anything you would like to see published, from creative writing of all sorts to rants and wrankles about the woes of the world to exhaustively-researched articles on the history of Mongolian cinematography to anything else that you think may be of interest to someone somewhere. Also, if anyone has any particular experiences of or notions, memories or thoughts about Berlin, we may be interested in hearing from you, as another function of the magazine will be as a guide for English-speakers coming to visit or live here.
Please send anything you would like to contribute to:
This is also the address to contact us on if you wish to be added to our e-mailing list and kept up to date with how the magazine is progressing and with any special happenings relating to it.
The deadline for contributions intended for the first edition is now past, but keep those pieces coming, as we're already looking ahead to the second issue a couple of months down the line. The final deadline for contributions has not yet been decided but the sooner we receibe your contributions the quicker we can push on.
Also, there is no specified word limit, but be sensible please! The maximum length of piece we can accept will vary from issue to issue depending on how many quality contributions we have to fill up the magazine with. However, if you send a piece we like but that happens to be too long, we can perhaps think about splitting it between more than one edition or taking a selection from it that we're all happy with. The truth is at this stage though, that smaller pieces probably have more chance of being included.
Please pass all this information on to anyone else who you think may be interested.
We very much hope to hear from you soon!
Sam and Kat. x