ELASTE didn’t begin with a master plan. It began with a stack of New York magazines on a Hannover kitchen table—and an affection for formats that refused to fit politely into kiosks.

Christian Wegner returned to Hannover from New York with a stack of indie magazines and no clear plan beyond a strong hunch. He didn’t yet know how formative they would become—only that the city, its noise, and the residue of 1970s downtown culture had lodged themselves somewhere permanent.

When I was still a teenager, a friend, Peter Meier, had already pointed me toward Warhol, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Bowie. They became my Partner im Geiste—proof that you could treat culture seriously without behaving seriously at all.

The real ignition point was a bar called Casablanca. Thomas Elsner was the DJ.
I worked the door—my job was to keep the chaos elegant and the fights theoretical.
Michael Reinboth was a regular and also ran a head shop, which at the time counted as both retail and cultural research.

One morning, he came upstairs to my apartment for breakfast. I spread the New York magazines across the table like contraband. I said something along the lines of: I want to do a magazine like this.
Michael said: Me too.
That was the meeting. No funding round. No mood board. No deck.

The next day, we were looking for a name.
Michael suggested ELASTE—borrowed from a chemical plant sign glimpsed along the eerie transit route through East Germany between Hannover and Berlin, when Berlin was still cut in half, and the Autobahn ran through heavily surveilled territory. It felt industrial, elastic, faintly dangerous. Perfect.

Berlin itself was already mythic in a strange way—cool mainly to Bowie and Iggy at that point, politically charged, culturally unresolved, irresistible. We liked names that carried tension.

Our business plan, if it deserves the term, was elegantly naïve: sell the ads ourselves (which we also designed), ask for the money after publication, then pay the printer. That was it. I can still laugh about it.

Our first slogan? “Die Mauer muss weg.”
We weren’t proposing a geopolitical strategy—we mostly meant that toilets should be unisex. Somehow, forty years later, that still feels oddly contemporary.

We also declared ELASTE the “Magazine for Männer und Frauen,” which didn’t sound radical to us at all—just obvious. Fashion, art, music, bodies, ideas: why split them?

None of this was highly theorized. We were intuitive. Party people with cameras and tape recorders. Working nights, arguing in kitchens, designing pages that barely held together.

I was internally tormented, externally unserious—a rebel with a cause, but not always with a plan.
Three months later, somehow, we had a magazine.

Looking back, that may have been the most subversive part.
— Christian Wegner, co-founder