Der Spiegel

Der Spiegel
Editor-in-Chief Mathias Müller von Blumencron and Georg Mascolo
Categories Newsmagazine
Frequency Weekly
Circulation 1,050,000 / week
Publisher SPIEGEL-Verlag
First issue 4 January 1947
Country Flag of Germany.svg Germany
Language German
Website Spiegel.de
ISSN 0038-7452

Der Spiegel (pronounced /deːɐ ˈʃpiːɡəl/, German for "The Mirror") is a German weekly magazine, published in Hamburg. It is Europe's largest weekly magazine with a circulation of more than one million per week.[1]

Contents

Overview

The first edition of the Spiegel magazine was published in Hanover on 4 January 1947, a Saturday. Its release was initiated and sponsored by the British occupational administration and preceded by a magazine titled, Diese Woche (This Week), which had been first published in November 1946. After disagreements with the British, the magazine was handed over to Rudolf Augstein as chief editor, and was renamed Der Spiegel. From the first edition in January 1947, Augstein held the position of editor-in-chief, which he retained right up until his death on 7 November 2002.

After 1950, the magazine was owned by Augstein and John Jahr; Jahr's share merged with Richard Gruner in 1965 to form the publishing company Gruner + Jahr. In 1969, Augstein bought out Gruner + Jahr for DM 42 million and became the sole owner of Der Spiegel. However, in 1971 Gruner + Jahr bought back a 25% share in the magazine. In 1974, Augstein restructured the company to make the employees shareholders. Every employee who works at the magazine for more than three years is offered the opportunity to become an associate and participate in the management of the company as well as in the profits.

Since 1952, Der Spiegel has been headquarted in its own building in the old town part of Hamburg.

Der Spiegel is similar in style and layout to American news magazines such as Time or Newsweek. In terms of the breadth and amount of detail given in its articles it is comparable to the Atlantic Monthly or the British Economist. It is known in Germany for its distinctive, academic writing style and its large volume—a standard issue may run 200 pages or more. Typically it has a content to advertising ratio of 2:1. However, due to the tougher economic constraints for many print media, the magazine had been slashed to 140-170 pages per issue. More recently, the average Spiegel issue returned to a size of more than 200 pages (circa November 2006).

Affairs and scandals

Der Spiegel has a long track record of uncovering political misconduct and creating scandals, earning itself the moniker "Sturmgeschütz der Demokratie" (assault gun of democracy) in its early decades. In fact, it became notorious for this role as early as 1950, when the federal parliament had to launch an inquiry into the Spiegel's accusations that bribed members of parliament had helped make Bonn (rather than Frankfurt) the seat of the West German government.

The incident that cemented the magazine's image as a sentinel of democracy, however, was the so-called Spiegel scandal in 1962. After an article had been printed that reported on the low state of readiness of the German armed forces, minister of defence and conservative figurehead Franz Josef Strauss initiated an investigation against the Spiegel, causing the editorial offices to be raided by the police and Rudolf Augstein as well as several other editors to be arrested on charges of treason. Although he had no authority to do so, Strauss even made sure that the article's author, Conrad Ahlers, was arrested in Spain where he was vacationing. The legal case collapsed soon, and the whole affair led to a major shake-up in the cabinet of chancellor Konrad Adenauer, including Strauss's resignation. The affair was widely viewed as an attack on the freedom of the press. Since then, Der Spiegel has played a significant part in uncovering various political grievances and misdeeds, including the Flick Affair.

Criticism

One of the main points of criticism that has been brought against Der Spiegel concerns the language that used to be cultivated in the magazine. In 1957 the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger published his essay Die Sprache des Spiegels (“The Language of Der Spiegel”), in which he criticised what he called a "pretended objectivity". Wolf Schneider, an eminent journalist and stylist has called Der Spiegel "the biggest mangler of the German language" and used quotations from the magazine as examples of bad German for his style guides. Their criticism was not so much one of linguistic aesthetics as an argument that Der Spiegel "hides and distorts its actual topics and issues by manipulative semantics and rhetoric rather than by reporting and analysing them".

Opinions about the aesthetics of the language employed by Der Spiegel changed in 1990s (if not earlier). After hiring many of Germany's best feature writers, Der Spiegel has become known for its "Edelfedern" ('noble quills' - wordsmiths). It must be acknowledged, however, that the magazine's linguistic style has not significantly changed since the early 1960s. It regularly wins the Egon Erwin Kisch award for the best German feature. Recently, Der Spiegel has joined the ranks of the proper grammar and jargon guardians with the Zwiebelfisch ("Onion fish", relating to German printer slang for a typographical error) column on the magazine's website, which has even spawned several best-selling books.

Some critics, in particular the Augstein biographer and former Der Spiegel writer Otto Köhler, have brought charges against the magazine's dealings with former Nazis, even SS officers. It is alleged that Der Spiegel, which at other times had no qualms about exposing the Nazi past of public figures, may have distorted history and protected perpetrators when it hired these insiders to write about Third Reich topics.

One of its staff members, Pavel Kassin, accused the magazine of propaganda and of taking a pro-American stance on the 2008 South Ossetian war. Kassin said he sent 29 pictures showing the devastation left by the Georgian military in South Ossetia to the magazine’s Hamburg headquarters, but was shocked to find that none of them appeared in the issue released the following Monday. Kassin had been working there the for 18 years and has never before had any problems getting his photographs published. "Could it be that the most liberal, democratic and independent magazine has gone down the road of ideological one-sided propaganda?" he said. "In my view this is one of the rare cases when Spiegel has taken a pro-American stance."[2]

Stance and issues

With Stefan Aust taking over in 1994, the paper's political stance is said to have drifted towards the right. Some argue its position had changed from being critical, but supportive towards the red-Green government to a "neo-liberal", "Thatcherist" stance. Others reply that Der Spiegel always used to be critical of those momentarily in power - be it the right or of the left. In fact, politicians of all stripes who had to deal with the magazine's attention often voiced their disaffection for it. Outspoken conservative Franz Josef Strauss contended that Der Spiegel was "the Gestapo of our time", whereas Socialist Willy Brandt called it "Scheißblatt" (i.e. a "shitty paper") during his time as German Chancellor.

Like many German media, Der Spiegel often pictures the country in a state of decline that will lead to eventual collapse if not prevented by radical political and economic reform. In this vein, the magazine often produces well-researched feature-length articles about the problems affecting Germany (such as demographic trends, the gridlock of the federal system, or the difficulties of the education system), and describes the current thoughts and options on how they might be resolved.

In March 2004, a controversy arose over the paper's harsh title-page polemic against Germany's wind power policy. Harald Schumann, a staff writer whose more balanced article on the same subject had not been accepted before, quit the magazine, accusing the editor-in-chief of authoritarian leadership and suppression of dissenting views among the writing staff. There have been speculations that Aust's involvement in real estate whose value might be lowered by the planned construction of nearby wind generators has led to the magazine's swing of opinion, as its reporting on regenerative power had been generally positive in the years before. Despite the criticism, the report in question was followed up by similarly aggressive articles attacking solar power.

Development

Spiegel headquarters, Hamburg

The Spiegel's circulation rose quickly, and so did its influence. From 15,000 copies in 1947, it grew to 65,000 in 1948 and 437,000 in 1961. By the 1970s it had reached a plateau at over 900,000 copies. Since then the circulation has gone up and down but overall changed little. The one million barrier was broken in 1990, perhaps due to a great number of new readers in East Germany. The influence that the magazine enjoys rests on two pillars; firstly the moral authority that was established by notable pieces of investigative journalism during the early years and reinforced by a number of impressive scoops during the 1980s; secondly the power of the Spiegel publishing house. It has been producing a TV programme, called Spiegel TV, since 1988, and further diversified during the 1990s. Among other things, Spiegel Verlag now publishes the monthly Manager Magazin.

In 1993 the publishing company Hubert Burda Media introduced the weekly magazine FOCUS which was designed to be an alternative to the Spiegel, featuring a flashier layout and a political slant that was more right-wing than the Spiegel's. It has been successful, eventually reaching roughly the Spiegel's circulation, but some critics consider it to be intellectually inferior.

Spiegel Online

Spiegel Online (abbreviated SPON) was introduced in 1994. Initially, it was only available to Compuserve users. The first web issue followed about half a year later on the Bundesdatenautobahn, the web's first content delivery network. Original content produced by its own editorial team is complemented by content purchased from news agencies. In addition to that, selected articles from the print edition are available online at no cost (this selection used to be quite comprehensive). The rest of the print publication is available in PDF format for a fee. Spiegel Online has been on a tight budget since 2000. Its editors are not compensated as well as their print counterparts, they receive special Spiegel Online rates. In 2002 archived articles were declared premium content; they were no longer freely available and have to be purchased. On 21 October 2004, an official English version called "Spiegel International" was introduced.

In February 2008, Spiegel opened its digital archive and made it searchable in their so-called "Spiegel Wissen" (Spiegel knowledge) website; results are interspersed with content from Wikipedia and other sources.

Today, Spiegel Online is the most popular online resource for news in Germany, and won the Grimme Online Award in 2005.

Editors-in-chief

See also

References

  1. ↑ Kevin J. O'Brien (2004-04-19). "Scoop on Bundesbank head returns focus to Der Spiegel". International Herald Tribune. Retrieved on 2008-01-02.
  2. ↑ German weekly in propaganda row over Ossetia conflict Russia Today Retrieved on 28-08-08

External links