Newspapers and Magazines

“Titanic – the ultimate satirical magazine” turns 30. Germany’s best satirical authors and cartoonists join forces to rub salt into society’s wounds with a blend of caustic and malicious humour in “the country’s most forbidden magazine”.

When in November 1979 a magazine named Titanic appeared on the market, nobody would have dreamt that it would one day become the flagship of German satire. The magazine was founded by renegade editors of pardon, a literary satirical publication in Frankfurt am Main: specifically, by F.K. Waechter, Chlodwig Poth, Hans Traxler, Robert Gernhardt and Peter Knorr, who today are among Germany’s best-known authors, illustrators and satirists.

Water pistol not sledgehammer

Just three years after the magazine was founded, the rest of the team at pardon threw in the towel; Titanic became the official mouthpiece for German satire under the aegis of the so-called New Frankfurt School. Ever since, no-one and nothing is safe from the magazine’s attacks. “Most importantly, we did not want to use the sledgehammer approach”, was how the illustrator Chlodwig Poth, who died in 2004, once pithily summarized the magazine’s intention: “Our weapon was to be the water pistol. Our aim was to ridicule, to send people up, to take the mickey.”

In keeping with this credo, the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was mockingly portrayed as the “pear” in legendary caricatures (which upheld the tradition of satirical depictions of those in power). His foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher rose to ironical new glory as “Genschman”, comic superhero and saviour of the world.

Humour as an antidote to fear

For thirty years now, Titanic has been rubbing salt into society’s wounds with scathing mockery and, at times, rather coarse jokes. Topical situations and political events of the day are satirized here in the extreme, often well beyond the pain threshold. This also includes whacky cover pictures with sensationalist headlines and potentially scandalous campaigns intended to cause a stir, such as the one about German reunification. “Germany breathes a sigh of relief: Wall will grow back” was the Titanic title on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Another edition featured on its cover a supposedly East German woman with tight-curled perm and cheap clothing from the GDR (often dubbed the “East Zone” by Westerners), holding a peeled cucumber in her hands with tears in her eyes, above the headline “Zone Gabi’s happiness: my first banana”.

Titanic reflects the history of German mentality better than almost any other publication. The “Mohammed lookalike competition” which the editor announced to be the “most dangerous event of the book fair” in the autumn of 2008, was cancelled in advance, to the great relief not only of the police and the public prosecutor’s office. “Humour is an antidote to fear”, proclaimed the new editor-in-chief Leo Fischer in an interview with German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

When satire misses the mark

During the course of its history, Titanic has landed itself with numerous legal proceedings, and many editions have been banned. The magazine had to pay 40,000 deutschmarks in damages to SPD politician Björn Engholm for featuring a malicious cover photomontage portraying the then Schleswig-Holstein premier lying grinning in a bath tub in 1993. Six years earlier, CDU politician Uwe Barschel, who had resigned from the post of minister president in the wake of a scandal (“the Barschel affair”), had been found dead in his hotel room in Geneva lying in exactly the same position in exactly the same bath tub pictured in the photomontage.

Of course, the media and legal circus is not planned. All the same, the scandals and court proceedings are “good publicity” for Titanic. After all, you need a magnifying glass to find any advertisements in “Germany’s most forbidden magazine” (Der Spiegel), so the crisis in the advertising market has done little damage to the publication. Titanic, which is funded almost exclusively through sales, has a circulation of 99,760.

From 2000 to 2005, Martin Sonneborn was editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine. Today he is the chairman of a political party called “Die Partei” (i.e. The Party) which he founded while still at Titanic. According to a number of media reports, it is thanks to one of his Titanic campaigns that the 2006 Football World Cup was hosted in Germany: in the summer of 2000, he sent hoax faxes to FIFA representatives offering them a bribe: “If you vote for Germany, you will receive a hamper containing German sausages and a cuckoo clock”. The fax unsettled the New Zealand delegate Charles Dempsey so much that he abstained from the vote the following day, resulting in a vote of 12:11 in favour of Germany.

Thomas Gsella succeeded Sonneborn as editor-in-chief of Titanic; his successor since October 2008 has been 28-year-old Leo Fischer. In September, Berlin-based Rowohlt Verlag published a volume to mark the 30th anniversary entitled Titanic – das endgültige Satirebuch: Das Erstbeste aus 30 Jahren (i.e. Titanic – the ultimate satirical book: the very best from 30 years).