Expulsion to paradise
Column Spiegel will soon be venturing over to Switzerland. And thus follows all those Germans who have already "crossed over" to "Zureich" and the surrounding area - also because of the Fränkli. Time for a biographical market analysis.
Column Spiegel will soon be venturing over to Switzerland. And thus follows all those Germans who have already "crossed over" to "Zureich" and the surrounding area - also because of the Fränkli. Time for a biographical market analysis.Monday has always been mirror day for me. Growing up in a border town in Thurgau, trips to the old town of Constance with its maze of alleyways and comparatively sophisticated student pubs inevitably had an event character. This was also the case when, at the beginning of the week, we took our father's hand and went to "Kreuzlingen Nord" (the Swiss version of the Constance license plate KN) for the ritual newspaper shopping trip. In the early 1970s, the news magazine from faraway Hamburg was only available on Tuesdays on this side of the turnpike, and the journalistic "assault gun of democracy" was part of the inventory of my parents' home, bringing a piece of voluntarily exchanged home to my old man's living room table week after week. In exchange for a material security and political stability that only existed and still exists on the Island of the Blessed. As a country with concordance and no opposition, Switzerland thrives on risk avoidance and consideration, even in journalism. The resulting boredom was probably the second reason, alongside the aforementioned patriotism, why there was only German press at home.
Apart from Köppel's editorial bodyguard, strikers and pushers with an investigative bite have remained an unknown species in Swiss writing rooms to this day. Karl Dietrich Seikel confirmed this when I interviewed him in the Spiegel Tower around three years ago. And the then head of the Spiegel publishing house (and Tamedia board member!) had a direct comparison, after all, at that time he was in charge of the penultimate Facts relaunch. For historical reasons, German and Swiss politics can hardly be compared, which is why the same applies to the type and content of reporting, Seikel aptly pointed out.
This difference in mentality could now prove decisive in the battle for the local magazine market. After all, what unique selling point does the orange Weltblatt have if not its myth of revelation? It is more likely that the foreign editorial team responsible for the CH split is blindly falling into the arrogance trap that is instinctively set here in Switzerland for everything that comes from the great northern canton. This will make it all the more difficult to provide journalistic proof that this "one-off" campaign is about more than a few extra advertising francs and/or the soft boiling of facts. In short, that even in perhaps the oldest, but certainly the most windless democracy in the world, storm guns are being deployed.
Not only in the publishing house, but also in the editorial department, Switzerland has so far been perceived - if at all - as a marginal economic phenomenon. In the last twelve months, for example, only "Sawiris' miracle in Andermatt", "Blatter superstar" and the "loss of customers from German casinos" to the new Swiss competition were considered worth reporting on. And Switzerland has never made it onto the cover of the news magazine. Even when the last frontal attack on banking secrecy was launched ten years ago, Der Spiegel ran the headline "The Liechtenstein Connection".
My father (and with him the growing community of homesick Germans) is certainly looking forward to the unexpected regional supplement in his favorite newspaper. Many of the war children who emigrated to Switzerland almost 50 years ago used the image of "expulsion to paradise". For most of them, but certainly for their descendants, this paradoxical step has worked out well. Let's see whether the same applies to what is probably the most German of all magazines.
Oliver Classen is media spokesman for the development policy organization Berne Declaration. He previously worked as a media journalist.
Apart from Köppel's editorial bodyguard, strikers and pushers with an investigative bite have remained an unknown species in Swiss writing rooms to this day. Karl Dietrich Seikel confirmed this when I interviewed him in the Spiegel Tower around three years ago. And the then head of the Spiegel publishing house (and Tamedia board member!) had a direct comparison, after all, at that time he was in charge of the penultimate Facts relaunch. For historical reasons, German and Swiss politics can hardly be compared, which is why the same applies to the type and content of reporting, Seikel aptly pointed out.
This difference in mentality could now prove decisive in the battle for the local magazine market. After all, what unique selling point does the orange Weltblatt have if not its myth of revelation? It is more likely that the foreign editorial team responsible for the CH split is blindly falling into the arrogance trap that is instinctively set here in Switzerland for everything that comes from the great northern canton. This will make it all the more difficult to provide journalistic proof that this "one-off" campaign is about more than a few extra advertising francs and/or the soft boiling of facts. In short, that even in perhaps the oldest, but certainly the most windless democracy in the world, storm guns are being deployed.
Not only in the publishing house, but also in the editorial department, Switzerland has so far been perceived - if at all - as a marginal economic phenomenon. In the last twelve months, for example, only "Sawiris' miracle in Andermatt", "Blatter superstar" and the "loss of customers from German casinos" to the new Swiss competition were considered worth reporting on. And Switzerland has never made it onto the cover of the news magazine. Even when the last frontal attack on banking secrecy was launched ten years ago, Der Spiegel ran the headline "The Liechtenstein Connection".
My father (and with him the growing community of homesick Germans) is certainly looking forward to the unexpected regional supplement in his favorite newspaper. Many of the war children who emigrated to Switzerland almost 50 years ago used the image of "expulsion to paradise". For most of them, but certainly for their descendants, this paradoxical step has worked out well. Let's see whether the same applies to what is probably the most German of all magazines.
Oliver Classen is media spokesman for the development policy organization Berne Declaration. He previously worked as a media journalist.
