The magazine many German parents didn't want their kids to read

What happened to BRAVO?

Shop in Bonn, West Germany, 1988. Img: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F079046-0031 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

I had a powerful blast from the past this week. Some people tell me that I’m too young to have those, but I don’t think so. For one thing, I reckon I’m officially in the “middle-aged” bracket now. For another, I was a kid before smartphones existed, and that is probably the key marker now on how one spent one’s formative years – before or after we held the whole world in our hands. It is from the world before, from those dark ages of the late 1990s, that a memory resurfaced in my mind this week.

Something in an article I was writing for a German newspaper made me think of the BRAVO magazine. If you were a teenager in Germany during the 1990s, chances are you had at least one copy of BRAVO hidden in your backpack, under your bed, or proudly displayed on your desk. For many of us, it was an essential companion through the turbulence of adolescence — a glossy weekly filled with pop stars, personal questions, and more than a little controversy.

Now, my parents, themselves children of the sixties and seventies, really weren’t particularly strict or prudish. I was allowed to stay with friends from a very young age. They trusted me with anything from my dad’s toolbox to early video games. In classic East German fashion, they both worked full-time, and so I grew up quickly, walking back from school, doing household chores, and being responsible for my own homework. I read all the Stephen King horror books from the library before Mutti or the librarian could work out what they were and stop me. But there was one thing so notorious that it worried even my parents: the BRAVO magazine.