Nebelspalter: No Breaking of Taboos for an End in Itself

Marco Ratschiller has been editor-in-chief of Nebelspalter for ten years. During this time, there has not been a single threat related to faith or religion, he said in response to an inquiry from the SDA news agency. Satire is "not an exact science" for Ratschiller. It plays with ambiguities and is sometimes not the best means of the hour to uphold media freedom, he said. The Nebelspalter editorial team takes a different course than Charlie Hebdo - according to Ratschiller, always with the target group in mind, who need to be entertained and stimulated to think. In 2012, for example, when the French magazine published cartoons of Muhammad, Nebelspalter made a conscious decision not to print them. "That's not our understanding of satire," Ratschiller says in response.

West "does not understand ban on images"

Western culture does not understand the ban on images in Islam. There, the depiction of Muhammad is a taboo violation, "while we ourselves basically don't even recognize a satirical punch line in it. Because: Such a caricature has a target group to which one does not belong oneself. Nebelspalter does not do this form of "breaking taboos as an end in itself. The editorial office of the magazine is located in a rural area and also employs numerous freelancers. It is therefore likely to be less exposed than a central editorial office in a large city. Nebelspalter has been published for 141 years and, according to its own information, is the oldest satirical magazine in the world. The German-language magazine comes out ten times a year and has a circulation of 21,000 copies.

Roger Köppel, editor-in-chief of Weltwoche, declined to comment on security issues on Wednesday. Satirist Andreas Thiel had criticized the Koran and Mohammed in a "polemic" at the end of November, causing an uproar. (SDA)

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