Mist splitter

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Mist splitter
Logo Nebelspalter.png
description Swiss satirical magazine
publishing company Engeli & Partner Verlag
First edition 1875
Frequency of publication per month
Sold edition 21,000 copies
( WEMF 2012)
Range 0.228 million readers
(MACH Basic)
Editor-in-chief Marco Ratschiller
editor Thomas Engeli
Web link www.nebelspalter.ch
ISSN (print) 0028-1786

The Nebelspalter is a Swiss satirical magazine . It was founded in Zurich in 1875 by Jean Nötzli (1844–1900) and Johann Friedrich Boscovits as an “illustrated humorous-political weekly paper” and has existed since the end of 1996 as a monthly magazine. The Nebelspalter has been the oldest satirical magazine in the world since the English Punch was discontinued (1841–2002).

Rise to national institution

The Nebelspalter had its best time in the 1930s and 1940s, when it  denounced the acts of violence and the ideology of the National Socialists and their followers in Switzerland - the frontists . In 1933 the Nebelspalter was banned in the German Reich . In the meantime, the circulation skyrocketed in Switzerland: in 1922, when the Rorschach publisher Ernst Löpfe-Benz took over the Nebelspalter , it was only 364 copies. In 1945 it was 30,000. In relation to National Socialism, the Nebelspalter had developed a self-image as the “spearhead of intellectual national defense ”, which it maintained in the Cold War against communism until the 1960s.

The magazine called "Nebi" owes its popularity to a large extent to the then editor-in-chief Carl Böckli (* 23 September 1889, † 4 December 1970), who, with his dual talent as draftsman and copywriter, is part of the Wilhelm Busch tradition . Until 1962 he produced thousands of cartoons, drawings and texts under the abbreviation "Bö". By the 1970s, the circulation rose to 70,000 copies. For decades, the Nebelspalter figured as a leading satirical medium and a talent factory in Switzerland, with which artist biographies are linked, for example those of well-known illustrators such as René Gilsi , Jakob Nef , Fritz Behrendt, Werner Büchi , Nico Cadsky , Horst Haitzinger as well as satirists such as César Keizer , Franz Hohler , Lorenz Keizer , Peter Stamm and Linard Bardill . The well-known Uri painter Heinrich Danioth also worked as a draftsman and illustrator for the Nebelspalter for 15 years . The poet Albert Ehrismann was a permanent collaborator for over three decades and published over 1,600 poems here.

1990s crisis

The Nebelspalter could no longer keep up with the rapid development of the Swiss media landscape in the last third of the 20th century . Caricatures, columns and other satirical forms migrated more and more into the daily press and into the audiovisual media. The increasingly staid-looking paper steadily lost subscribers and readers. In the 1990s, under editor-in-chief Iwan Raschle, the radical realignment of the Nebelspalter in the style of the Frankfurt Titanic failed. The circulation slumped from 34,000 copies to 17,000, and the shrinking advertising volume exacerbated the crisis. Several changes in the editor-in-chief followed and in 1996 the title was sold to the Basel-based Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag. It was announced that it would be discontinued at the end of April 1998 with a circulation of 8,000.

Signs of sustainable recovery

In 1998 the Thurgau publisher Thomas Engeli took over the ailing paper at the last minute. He succeeded in stopping the decline in subscribers and readers and initiating an opposite development. The magazine now has 200 regular text and image authors again. For the 130th birthday of the title in 2005, the Nebelspalter has evidently dared the gentle relaunch with some success. Under the new management of the editorial team appointed with Marco Ratschiller, the title underwent a face-lift with a simple columnist touch and managed to attract well-known exponents of the current Swiss author and satire scene such as Andreas Thiel , Simon Enzler , Pedro Lenz , Gion Mathias Cavelty and Hans Suter for to commit the booklet. At the beginning of 2012, the Nebelspalter appeared with a print run of 21,000 copies and, according to the market research study MACH Basic, had 229,000 readers per issue. The Nebelspalter main editions appear ten times a year on the first Friday of each month (with the exception of August and January).

Fog splitter publisher

  • Jean Nötzli, Zurich, 1875–1900
  • Nötzli estate, 1900–1902
  • Johann Friedrich Boscovits, Zurich, 1902–1912
  • Fritz Ebersold, Zurich, 1912–1913
  • Jean Frey AG , Zurich, 1914–1921
  • Ernst Löpfe Benz AG , Rorschach, 1921–1996
  • Friedrich Reinhardt AG, Basel, 1996–1998
  • Engeli & Partner Verlag, Horn, since 1998

Editors-in-chief of the Nebelspalters

  • Jean Nötzli, 1875–1900
  • Edwin Hauser, 1900–1903 (text editor)
  • Johann Friedrich Boscovits (picture editor since 1900, editor-in-chief 1903–1914)
  • Paul Altheer, 1914–1927
  • Carl Böckli , 1927–1952 (picture editor until 1967)
  • Franz Mächler, 1952–1984
  • Werner Meyer-Léchot, 1984-1993
  • Iwan Raschle , 1993-1996
  • Jürg Vollmer , 1996
  • Hans Suter, 2000–2004 not to be confused with the current writer Hans Suter
  • Marco Ratschiller , since 2005

literature

  • Carl Böckli: So simmer. 84 Drawings and verses by Bö from the Nebelspalter . Nebelspalter, Rorschach 1955.
  • Marija Borer-Cifric: The Nebelspalter as a cultural-historical and political source of the Kulturkampf of the years 1875-1890 . Licensed thesis at the University of Zurich , 1999.
  • Laurence Danguy, Le Nebelspalter zurichois (1875–1921). Au coeur de l'Europe des revues et des arts , Geneva, Droz, Presse et caricature, 2018, ISBN 2-600-05912-1 , ISBN 978-2-600-05912-1
  • Frank Feldman: KOHLs and sells. The best cabbage satires from the Swiss 'Nebelspalter' . Art-und-Grafik-Verlag, Ettlingen 1992.
  • Jaerman, Schwaad: IGOR, a social hygienic concoction in 76 completed elaborations . Nebelspalter-Verlag, Rorschach, 1995, ISBN 3-85819-215-5
  • Hans A. Jenny: 111 years of Nebelspalter. A satirical Swiss mirror . Nebelspalter, Rorschach 1985, ISBN 3-85819-078-0 .
  • Ernst Kindhauser et al .: Carl Böckli. His time, his work . Nebelspalter, Rorschach 1989, ISBN 3-85819-141-8 .
  • Against red and brown fists. World events from 1932 to 1948 in 342 caricatures from the Nebelspalter (new edition). Nebelspalter, Rorschach 1975 (first edition 1949).
  • Bruno Knobel: Switzerland in the Nebelspalter. Caricatures 1875 to 1974 . 1974, 1975.
  • Bruno Knobel: Whoever digs a pit for another. Satires, caricatures and other things from the Nebelspalter in the judgment of letters to the editor . Nebelspalter, Rorschach 1983.
  • Peter Métraux: The caricature as a journalistic form of expression. Investigated in the fight of the “Nebelspalters” against National Socialism 1933–1945 . Berlin, FU, Diss., 1965.
  • Regula Schmid: Bosco, Fritz Boscovits and the Nebelspalter . Verlag Hier und Jetzt, Baden Switzerland 2017; ISBN 978-3-03919-424-7 (with picture section: drawings from the Nebelspalter 1889–1956, pp. 43–183).

Web links

Commons : Nebelspalter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files