Der Spiegel at 50

▪ 1998

      On Jan. 4, 1997, Germany's leading weekly for news and analysis, Der Spiegel, celebrated its 50th anniversary. The magazine had long been something of a fat and mischievous only child in the German journalistic community. In 1947, when Rudolf Augstein received a license from the British zonal authorities to publish a newsmagazine, Germany's situation was sensational and scandalous enough, so the 23-year-old entrepreneur hardly needed to turn to sensationalism and scandal. Because this was the type of magazine that was launched, however, Der Spiegel soon found its access to authoritative sources progressively reduced. Comparatively few respectable public figures would lend themselves to a Spiegel interview (Chancellor Helmut Kohl consistently refused to be interviewed by Der Spiegel, and he was noticeably absent at Augstein's 70th birthday celebration in 1993), so Der Spiegel turned to other sources, exposing the underside of the upper classes, particularly the political class. The gleanings were served up in each issue in five or six long narrative articles, garnished with anecdote and innuendo and sauced with almost subliminal derogatory suggestion.

      Despite all this—indeed, because of it—Der Spiegel was the most important publication in Germany. On the one hand, since it trafficked in suspicion and resentment, it acquired a large constituency of grudge-bearing readers; on the other, it lent itself to all forms of political opposition. Instead of splitting away, dissident factions of political parties went into hiding and emerged in the offices of the magazine. Der Spiegel penetrated all political parties, and the range of its political coverage was unmatched in Germany. Above all, the magazine was the standard-bearer of Germany's confused and resentful postwar intellectuals. It also struck fear into the hearts of the elite and so brought comfort to the dispossessed and disaffected little people of Germany. In this way the magazine worked as a palliative to the country's enduring epidemic of envy.

      The success of Der Spiegel rested on Augstein's diagnosis of the deep psychological wounds of the German body politic. The division of Germany prolonged the confusion of moral values caused by the Third Reich, treason in one part of Germany constituting by definition heroism in the other. Augstein exploited these infirmities in pursuit of his own goal: a neutralist, antimilitaristic West Germany. In short, Der Spiegel's editorial policy was tailored to the Cold War and to a separate West Germany. Augstein called the desire of the West Germans for reunification the Lebenslüge ("life-sustaining lie") of the Federal Republic; however, he simply ignored the desire of the East Germans for reunification.

      With the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of West and East Germany, Der Spiegel lost much of its editorial traction. The launching of the weekly newsmagazine Focus in January 1993 broke the monopoly Der Spiegel had enjoyed for 46 years. Within four years Focus had all but matched the dwindling circulation (roughly one million copies sold) of Der Spiegel. If reunification wrapped up the postwar period for Germany, perhaps Der Spiegel's era had also come to an end.

GEORGE BAILEY

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