The cross section

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Cover of the spring issue of 1922
Cover from February 1927. With a drawing by Ernst Aufseeser

The Cross Section - The Magazine of Current Eternal Values was a cultural magazine from the 1920s and 1930s.

history

The magazine was originally initiated in 1921 by the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim as a newsletter for his gallery and, in the form of a yearbook, achieved print runs of 500 to 700 copies in 1921-23. In 1923, together with Heinz Tiedemann , Willy Dreyfus and Albert Dreyfus , Flechtheim founded the Cross-Section Publishing Group. In November 1924 Flechtheim and Wedderkop were able to convince the publisher Hermann Ullstein to publish the magazine in Propylaen-Verlag . In its most successful period (1924–31) it was published by Hermann von Wedderkop . Around the mid-1920s, it is said to have had print runs of around 10,000 as a quarterly publication in the Ullsteinhaus . In the heyday of 1928–29 there were even 20,000. The cross-section functioned as a Zeitgeist magazine in which modern literature (Hemingway, Proust, Pound, Joyce) and art (Picasso, Leger, Chagall) found their place as well as "artistic" nudes and photos of middleweight boxers and dancers or experience reports from (Hinter -) Court singers and gigolos. Franz Blei and Anton Kuh made frequent contributions in the heyday of the magazine. Willi Baumeister , who teaches at the Frankfurt art school and for whom the magazine campaigned intensively from 1928, not least under the influence of Alfred Flechtheim, gave the cross-section an attractive, highly promotional appearance simply by means of a modern "eye-catcher": "On the outside cover of the February Heftes 1931 [...] encountered [...] for the first time that 'beautiful red' Q '' whose attribution to Baumeister is secured by Walther Kiaulehn's description of a joint visit with Ernst Rowohlt in the artist's Stuttgart studio in 1946 [...] ”.

From a political point of view, the cross-section was rather neutral, but with an elitist, snobbish and ironic tendency: "For the masses, the cross-section never made sense ... People were misera plebs". The magazine did not participate in the incitement of the right against the Weimar Republic, but in the late twenties editor Wedderkop showed clear sympathy for Benito Mussolini , which was also expressed in a major interview and which may have been one of the reasons for his gradual replacement.

From January 1, 1930 to May 1933, Victor Wittner (1896–1949) was editor-in-chief and laboriously tried to steer the paper through the economically and politically gloomy times. The global economic crisis and the rise of the NSDAP to power led to massive drops in circulation. Afterwards Wolfram von Hanstein and his wife Elisabeth continued to run the magazine on a low intellectual level.

1935–36, Edmund Franz von Gordon undertook one last rescue attempt as part of the Steglitzer Verlag. After all, there was one last brief boom in the magazine between 1935 and 1936, when the number of copies sold increased from 1,600 to 16,000. After the end of the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, however, the cosmopolitan upper-class magazine was banned by the NSDAP after an attack in the SS organ Das Schwarze Korps . The occasion was a small “foreign dictionary” in which, among other things, the terms absurd as “when someone is still hoping for better times”, the features section as “what is still read in the newspaper” and Vulkan as “a dance floor in critical times”. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary on October 13, 1936:

“Yesterday: read, worked. Two magazines, Inneres Reich and Cross Section, banned because of outrageous insolence. That was good. They were cheeky as dirt again. "

anecdote

Ottomar Starke commented on the origin of the name Cross section as follows: “I thought (to Alfred Flechtheim, who was looking for advice) that the title of the magazine should begin with a less common letter of the alphabet so that it would appear in the catalogs in a visible place, i.e. with a Q, an X or a J. And I immediately thought of the word cross-section. "

literature

  • Andreas Zeising: Steering and distraction. Image confrontations in the magazine “Cross Section”. In: Katja Leiskau, Patrick Rössler, Susann Trabert (ed.): German illustrated press. Journalism and visual culture in the Weimar Republic, Baden-Baden. Nomos 2016, pp. 355–376.
  • Wilmont Haacke , Alexander von Baeyer: The cross section - Facsimile cross section through the cross section 1921-1936. Ullstein, Munich / Berlin etc. 1977, ISBN 3-548-04716-5 .

Web links

Commons : The cross section  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Brooker: The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume III: Europe 1880-1940. P. 875.
  2. ↑ Wilmont Haacke, Alexander von Baeyer: The cross section - Facsimile cross section through the cross section 1921-1936. Ullstein, Munich / Berlin etc. 1977, ISBN 3-548-04716-5 , p. XXVIII.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Kermer : Willi Baumeister and the magazine "Der Cross Section" . In: Wolfgang Kermer (Ed.): Willi Baumeister: Stuttgart and the Swabians (= workshop series 6). State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, 1999, pp. 11–12. The cover of the booklet “End of February 1931” with the Baumeisterchen title sign “Q” illustrated in full color. in: Wolfgang Kermer: Willi Baumeister - typography and advertising design. Edition Cantz, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-89322-145-X , p. 285.
  4. ↑ Wilmont Haacke, Alexander von Baeyer: The cross section - Facsimile cross section through the cross section 1921-1936. Ullstein, Munich / Berlin etc. 1977, ISBN 3-548-04716-5 , p. XXII.
  5. ↑ Joseph Goebbels: Diaries. Part I - Records 1923-1941. (Ed. By Elke Fröhlich, edited by Jana Richter). Volume 3 / II, March 1936 to February 1937. KG Saur Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-598-23729-4 , p. 211.
  6. ↑ Wilmont Haacke, Alexander von Baeyer: The cross section - Facsimile cross section through the cross section 1921-1936. Ullstein, Munich / Berlin etc. 1977, ISBN 3-548-04716-5 , p. VI.