At the end of the rainbow

 
Column You, one of the most bizarre and touching Swiss media legends, is coming back to life. 
The great treasure is buried at the end of the rainbow, says the legend, and many are on their way to unearth it. Money is currently being made with ever faster media aimed at time gaps. But the very brave, the great optimists are on their way to the other end of the rainbow and are throwing themselves at very slow quality media. With the successful Cicero, Ringier has shown in Germany that it can work. Now an agile small publisher is also trying it: Oliver Prange, who has already shown with Persönlich (and thus as a respected competitor of Werbewoche) how to revitalize outdated titles. Recently there was a relaunch party for Du. The fact that over three hundred people came - and what a crowd! -signaled the importance of the event. One of the most bizarre and touching Swiss media legends was revived here, and the Du has even made it into the Swiss lexicon. It says: "Kulturelle Monatsschrift, founded in 1941 by A. Kübler, originally published by Conzett & Huber, today published by Tages-Anzeiger AG in Zurich; merged with the Ztschr. "Atlantis", circulation 1990: 24,000." In the meantime, time has passed over the Du. When Tages-Anzeiger AG became the listed company Tamedia, there was no longer any room for the noble cultural project. In 2003, the title went to book publisher Niggli, who focused on architecture, art and typography, but he couldn't cope with the magazine and passed it on to Prange.
The ancestry of the title gives rise to high hopes in terms of curiosity and non-conformism. Conzett & Huber is now just a memory - but a fascinating one. The printer and publisher Conrad Conzett (1848-1907) was both an entrepreneur and a socialist, printed the Grütlianer and the Arbeiterstimme, and was president of the trade union federation. His son Hans (1886-1918) was a printer and publishing partner, SP National Councillor and supported the strikers. Hans Conzett junior, born in 1915, was a publisher who promoted the Manesse Library of World Literature, which still exists today, and the newspaper Du. He continued the political family tradition by being a BGB National Councillor from 1951 to 1971 - indeed, he was one of those who led the left-wing bourgeois democrats into the new SVP.
The Du was founded by Conzett & Huber in order to regularly demonstrate its gravure printing skills to an international specialist audience - it was a monthly reference for the printing company, which at the time had to compete against Ringier, Walter Olten, Bucher Lucerne, etc. The A. Kübler was called Arnold (1890-1983) and was one of Zurich's most unusual cultural figures of the 20th century: sculptor, illustrator, actor, cabaret artist, writer (with his "Öppi" novels, which he wrote in Zurich's Bahnhofbuffet). From 1929 to 1941, he managed the Zürcher Illustrierte for Conzett & Huber, which became a competitor to Ringier's Schweizer Illustrierte, particularly in the fields of sport and culture; Paul Ringier then founded Sie & Er as an "antidote" to the initially successful ZI. Kurt Guggenheim memorialized Kübler in his magnificent Zurich novel "Alles in allem".
When the Zürcher Illustrierte was no longer economically viable, the Du came along - first with Arnold Kübler, then with Weltwoche founder Manuel Gasser: a themed magazine with a pioneering profile. Du introduced the Swiss educated middle classes to Klee, Picasso, Braque and Miró for the first time. Du made photographers such as Werner Bischof, Emil Schulthess, Hans Staub and Paul Senn famous. Walter Robert Corti, Emil Schulthess, Hugo Loetscher and Willy Rotzler were encountered as authors. For many years, the Du magazines, which were built around major themes, were part of the basic cultural equipment of the upscale Swiss middle-class household and a fixture in hundreds of waiting rooms. The Du was highly regarded, was collected and bound in annual volumes, and some outstanding issues still fetch high prices in second-hand bookshops today.
But over time, the most insidious of all media phenomena occurred: "Everybody likes it - nobody buys it". You can't live off a good reputation and an honorable past alone. But it can help, especially if the new you is able to revive the free spirit and the tendency to think outside the box of its publishing and journalistic ancestors. God grant that it may "heal" ...
 
Karl Lüönd is a freelance journalist and author