Newspapers and Magazines

The "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"- (FAZ) is Germany's third-oldest national daily newspaper. In contrast to the "Süddeutsche" and "Welt" newspapers, the "FAZ" manages to do without an editor-in chief. The newspaper's prestige has been considerably enhanced by its arts pages – pages on which these days more and more political discourse is being sparked off.

On 1^st November 1949, four years after the end of the second world war, the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" - (FAZ) - the last of Germany's leading national dailies - was launched. Ever since then its readers, above all people with a grammar school education or academic background, have proved to be a particularly loyal readership. (As the paper's own advert proudly proclaims, "bright sparks are always sticking their noses into the FAZ!") The thing they particularly value about the "Paper for Germany", as the paper likes to call itself, is not only its expert and reliable information on business, culture and politics; it is above all its special intellectual background that draws readers to the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" rather than to its competitors – the "Süddeutsche" and the "Welt".

Intellectual Profile

The profile of the FAZ was once aptly described by one of its earlier publishers, Friedrich Karl Fromme; he used the colours of the German flag – black/red/gold - to capture the essence of the paper. In Germany the colour black stands for a conservative political stance, red for its arts pages that tend to lean to the left and gold for its liberal approach to economics. At the moment this blend manages to sell more than 370,000 copies every day. About 45,000 of them go abroad. Subscribers can also access the online version of the FAZ on the evening before it goes out.

Business

Frankfurt am Main is Germany's most important business and financial marketplace. It is hardly surprising then that more than a third of the paper's central editing staff of over 115 is made up of business journalists. Up to this day they are still imbued by the successes of the German economic miracle of the 1950's and they continue to pursue their unflinching course of free competition and a socially oriented market economy á la Adam Smith, Ludwig Erhard and Friedrich August von Hayek.

If you read their reports, analyses and commentaries, you will be left in no uncertainty about how Germany as a business location is faring and how it is coping with globalisation. Even the particularly lucrative "Situations Vacant" section for skilled professionals and executives in the Saturday edition serves as a business indicator. If there are 40 or more pages of them, this is interpreted by banks and companies as a positive business outlook; if there are fewer than 40 pages, the future looks somewhat gloomy.

Culture

Alongside the business pages the cultural section has always traditionally contributed to the prestige of the paper. With well over 30 people it is the second-largest group within the central editorial staff. It has been headed by such famous literary names as Friedrich Sieburg, Marcel Reich-Ranicki and the Hitler-biographer, Joachim C. Fest. Their brilliantly written and researched articles have quite often polarised the readership.

Since 1989 Frank Schirrmacher has been setting the tone. He is now 45 years old and he is not just interested in the debating and review pages; Schirrmacher, who has in the meantime become co-publisher, has also managed to inject a scientific element into the cultural pages. Along with all the reviews on books, theatre and cinema the reader will now find observations on the upheavals taking place in the field of bio, nano- and computer-technology.

Like his predecessors, Schirrmacher has also managed to make a name for himself as an author. It was not however with a critical appreciation of the work of Thomas Mann or Günter Grass, as one might expect, but with a book called The Methuselah Plot (Das Methusalem Komplott) that was at the top of all the German best-seller charts for months.

Publishers Instead of Editor-in Chief

There are two respects in which the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" differs from the "Welt" and the "Süddeutsche". Its front page never has photos. A few exceptions have been made however on rare occasions of earth-shattering importance like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. And secondly, the FAZ has no single editor-in-chief. A committee of five publishers decide the course the paper is to take. Their names can be found in the paper's masthead. They work in line "with the principle of deference and clarify their opinions by constantly exchanging ideas" with the department heads.

Politics

To put it in more concrete terms – the publishers make sure that the FAZ is and remains Germany's most important conservative organ. This is clearly illustrated by the editorials and commentaries on its political pages. The paper feels a particular affinity to the body of thought propounded by the German Christian Democrat and Free Democrat parties – the idea of individual freedom and the protection of private property. If there is a general election on the doorstep, conservative and liberal politicians can rest assured that they will be especially able to express their views at length in the "Paper for Germany".

Recommended Reading Lutz Hachmeister, Friedemann Siering: Die Herren Journalisten, Die Elite der deutschen Presse nach 1945 (Gentlemen Journalists, The German Press Elite after 1945 , 328 pages, published by Verlag C.H.Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-47597-3 (with some comprehensive chapters on the founders of the "Frankfurter Allgemeine" newspaper")