Hot Irons in Germany

Each Tuesday, as regularly as Black Forest clockwork, West Germany's 40,000 newsstands burst into gaudy bloom. Millions of West Germans have been waiting for the display. For 50 pfennigs (about 12-c- a copy, they snatch up their choice of ten Illustrierte--illustrated magazines --whose covers range over almost everything a girl has to offer. Last week, for example, eye-filling young ladies smiled or pouted from all but two of the ten covers. Inside them all, readers found just about the same fare: simplified politics, spicy private lives of film starlets, newsreel-like flashes of current events, all well basted with pinup art. West Germans find this dish so tasty that they have made the Illustrierte West Germany's most competitive and fastest-growing journalistic field.

Outside West Germany, no parallel exists for this phenomenal postwar proliferation of picture magazines. The largest, Henri Nannen's Stern (Star), published in Hamburg, sells more than 1,400,000 copies, has just recently splashed past Munich's Quick (1,300,000) and Revue (1,100,000). West Germans buy some 8,000,000 Illustrierte each week, and a unique recirculation device, Die Lesezirkel (the reading circle), whose members buy recirculated magazines by the package, assures a readership well beyond that. Editor Nannen claims that Stern eventually sheds its garish light on 12 million.

Hitler's Mustache. A onetime radio scriptwriter and art magazine editor, Nannen got into the Illustrierte field after World War II. He had a tradition to follow. Die Gartenlaube (the Garden Bower) blazed the trail in the 19th century with steel engravings; before World War II Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung reached a circulation of 1,500,000. With this kind of audience in mind, Nannen founded Stern in 1948, settled on an adroit mixture of sex and politics, and generated a hungry brood of copycats--Quick, Revue, Kristall, Weltbild, Neue Illustrierte, Bunte Deutsche Illustrierte.

So many of them ran glorified German war memoirs, after Nannen's model, that scornful Germans attached the same label to all such articles: "I Was Hitler's Mustache." But few imitators have cared to follow Nannen's bold and often perilous excursions into the borderlands of libel and government abuse. In 1951 allied authorities banned Stern for two weeks after the magazine charged mismanagement of German tax money. But when the German government confirmed the accuracy of these charges and the ban was lifted, circulation jumped 180,000 in a single issue. Nannen has also opposed reunification of Germany on the ground that West Germans do not want it ("It would cost them money and sleep").

"Fasst Heisse Eisen An." Fast-moving, 46-year-old Henri Nannen, tooling around Hamburg in a Mercedes 3005L sports car whose doors unfurl like butterfly wings, boasts that Stern "fasst heisse Eisen an"--grasps hot irons: "We attack abuse of authority, attack bureaucracy--that's new in traditionally obedient Germany." Such attacks are balanced with forays on privacy: the magazine is now serializing a bedroom Baedeker on budding movie queens ("How hard and merciless is the way to the top").

Other picture magazines play variations on the Nannen themes, but the differences are usually imperceptible. This makes it hard to explain why Stern is first in the Illustrierte sweepstakes, a mystery one also-ran has solved with the invidious remark that "Nannen has the sort of hysterical temperament it takes to run an illustrated." Some German journalists argue that that is also what it takes to read one.

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