- Nebelspalter
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Nebelspalter File:Logo Nebelspalter.png Editor in Chief Marco Ratschiller Categories Swiss satirical magazine Frequency monthly Circulation 21000 Publisher Engeli & Partner Verlag First issue 1875 Website http://www.nebelspalter.ch The Nebelspalter is a Swiss satirical magazine. It was founded in 1875 by Jean Nötzli of Zurich as "Illustrirtes humoristisch-politisches Wochenblatt" and continues to this day, since late 1996 as a monthly. Nebelspalter is the oldest satirical magazine in the world after the demise of the English magazine Punch (1841-2002).
Contents
Becoming a national institution
The Nebelspalter enjoyed its best time in the 1930s, during and after the Second World War when it denounced the acts of violence and ideology of the Nazis and their followers in Switzerland, the Frontists. In 1933 Nebelspalter was banned in the German Empire. Meanwhile its circulation in Switzerland rapidly increased: In 1922 when the Rorschach publisher Ernst Ernst Löpfe Löpfe-Benz took over the Nebelspalter its circulation was only 364 copies. In 1945 it was 30,000. The Nebelspalter understood itself as a "spearhead of mental defense" against National Socialism, taking the same stand in the Cold War against communism until the 1960s .
The popularity of the "Nebi", as it was called, was to a large extent due to the then editor-in-chief Carl Böckli (born September 23, 1889, † 4 December 1970), doubly talented as an illustrator and writer in the tradition of Wilhelm Busch. Under his pen name "Bo", he produced thousands of cartoons, drawings and texts until 1962. Circulation rose to 70,000 copies by the 1970s. For decades, the Nebelspalter was Switzerland's leading satirical medium and talent factory, associated with the biographies of such well known artists as René Gilsi, Jakob Nef, Fritz Behrendt, Nico Cadsky, and Horst Haitzinger, and of satirists such as César Keiser, Franz Hohler, Lorenz Keiser, Peter Root and Linard Bardill. The well-known Uri painter Heinrich Danioth was a draftsman and illustrator for the Nebelspalter for 15 years. The poet Albert Ehrismann was on the staff for more than three decades and published over 1,600 poems published there.
Crisis of the 1990s
The Nebelspalter could not keep up with the rapid development of the Swiss media landscape in the last third of the 20th Century. Cartoons, columns and other satirical forms migrated more and more into the daily press and the audiovisual media. As it became more conventional the magazine steadily lost subscribers and readers. In the 1990s, the radical realignment of the Nebelspalter under editor-in-chief Ivan Raschle following the style of the Frankfurt Titanic magazine failed. The circulation plummeted from 34,000 copies to 17,000, and the shrinking number of advertisements further aggravated the crisis. The editor changed several times and in 1996 the magazine was sold to the Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag of Basel. With a circulation of 8000, the suspension of publication was announced at the end of April 1998.
Signs of sustainable recovery
In 1998, the Thurgau publisher Thomas Engel took over the ailing paper in the last minute. He managed to stop the loss of subscribers and readers and launch a new approach. Meanwhile, the magazine again has 200 regular text and image contributors. For its 130th anniversary in 2005, Nebelspalter ventured a gentle relaunch, apparently with some success. With a newly appointed editorial board under Marco Ratschiller the title underwent a face-lift leading toward an unpretentious journalistic style and managed to win over well-known contemporary Swiss authors and satirists like Andreas Thiel, Simon Enzler, Pedro Lenz and Gion Mathias Cavelty. Early in 2010 Nebelspalter appeared in a print run of 21,000 copies and according to the market research study BasicMACH had 252,000 readers per issue. The main edition of Nebelspalter appears ten times a year on the first Thursday of each month (except in August and January). In addition, , a 16-page, up-to-date Nebelspalter Extra has appeared since early 2010; it is published between two main issues in a print run of 80,000 copies.
Publishers
- Jean Nötzli, Zurich, 1875-1902
- Johann Friedrich Boscovits, Zurich, 1902-1914
- Jean Frey AG, Zurich, 1914-1921
- Ernst Löpfe Benz AG, Rorschach, 1921-1996
- Friedrich Reinhardt AG, Basel, 1996-1998
- Engeli & Partner Verlag, Horn, 1998
Chief editors
- Jean Nötzli, 1875-1900
- J. Hauser, 1900-1912
- Paul Altheer, 1914-1927
- Carl Böckli, 1927-1952 (picture editor until 1967)
- Franz Maechler, 1952-1984
- Werner Meyer-Léchot, 1984-1993
- Ivan Raschle, 1993-1996
- Jürg Vollmer, 1996
- Hans Suter, 2000-2004
- Marco Ratschiller, since 2005
Literature
- Jenny, Hans A.: 111 years Nebelspalter. A satirical Swiss mirror, 1985.
- Child Hauser, Ernst et al. Böckli Carl. His time, his work, 1989.
- Knobel, Bruno: Switzerland in Nebelspalter. Cartoons 1875-1974, 1974.
- Böckli, Carl: So simmer. 84 drawings and verses of soils from the Nebelspalter, 1955.
External links
- website of the magazine
- Nebelspalter, The in 24 818 .php German, 24 818 .php French and 24 818 .php Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
Categories:- Satirical magazines
- Swiss magazines
- Swiss media
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