HAMBURG.- What constitutes a magazine that accompanies a national newspaper? What are its characteristics, how do its topics arise, and why do photographs play a very different role than they do in newspaper format? The exhibition showing at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg is concerned with questions such as these. How does such a magazine come to be, what are its constitutive elements, what varies from issue to issue, what is always changing? And how does it differ from magazines that are sold individually at newsstands? In short, the focus is on the concept and specific characteristics that make up a magazine, seen through the example of Zeitmagazin, a supplement of the German national weekly newspaper Die Zeit. The exhibition looks primarily at the use of images and illustrations. The magazine’s special features, from individual sections to prominent photo series, are laid out like a cross section and can be compared with each other. Over 200 individual pieces are on display, some printed in enlarged form.

When Die Zeit appeared in 1970 for the first time with a colour-printed supplement, there was a fair amount of resistance to the idea. Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, editor of the weekly newspaper, was sceptical about ‘what the speculative nature of the images meant’, recalled Jochen Steinmayr, the magazine’s first editor-in-chief, in 1996. Yet it was not long before Zeitmagazin, with its colour advertisements and illustrations, began to enjoy increasing popularity with readers and advertisers. Zeitmagazin was discontinued in 1999, and a new department within Die Zeit called ‘Leben’ (Life) took its place. In 2007 ‘the emotional and personal side of Die Zeit’, as it styles itself, reappeared under the old name as its own magazine in Die Zeit. Editor-in-chief Christoph Amend has been responsible for the content of the magazine since then. The combination of reportage, essays, profiles and interviews, photographs by internationally renowned artists, columns, and art and style features builds on the tradition of the old Zeitmagazin.

Unlike Die Zeit, which has its headquarters in Hamburg, Zeitmagazin is made in Berlin. The two publications make arrangements to avoid duplicating content. The editorial staff has a strong base of over 30 editors, journalists, and other employees. The magazine varies in length from 50 to 120 pages, depending on the topics covered and the number of ads. The different recurring sections are an important part of each issue: from the lovable comic drawn by Janosch under the table of contents to the interview on the last page (‘Das war meine Rettung’ or ‘That was my salvation’), more than a dozen familiar sections are spread out throughout the magazine, forming a solid framework into which longer articles are built. Well-known features include Harald Martenstein’s commentary on everyday life, the Deutschlandkarten that answer absurd questions in the form of maps (how are sundials, black-headed goldfinches, or farms that do their own slaughtering distributed throughout Germany?), the dreams of celebrities, and the pages of games and puzzles. Major pieces of political reportage also appear regularly.

Zeitmagazin takes it upon itself to prioritize its visual elements. These are given the same value and attention as the words in the magazine, often created independently and assembled together with the text for the first time by the editorial staff. This independent value of the images (which are for the most part photographs, though excellent illustrations are by no means rare) can be seen right away in the ‘double’ frontispiece: regularly, the title page is immediately followed by a page with a second version of the title, and it is not until this second page that the issue’s themes are addressed in writing.