The editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine Titanic is one of the youngest in the country
Last year the magazine Titanic celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. At the journalistic forefront of the satirical magazine from Frankfurt is 28-year-old Leonard Fischer. Every month, Fischer issues 100,000 copies; the subscriber numbers are well above those of the founder years, although it’s a long time since Titanic was available at all newspaper stands.
Frankfurt am Main (pia) “We’re a divided country, aren’t we?” Leonhard “Leo” Fischer maliciously asks. Provocative statements like this make the young editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine sound like anything but a carefully deliberating man of the printed word. He talks like a politician, and in fact he is one. “Unification was a mistake”, so the unwavering analysis of the part-time party official, “and we’ll be working hard on those unhealthy new states for a long time to come.” Leo Fischer, from the tranquil city of Regensburg in the Upper Palatinate, spent his formative early years in the sophisticated but terribly isolated Swiss mountain town of Davos, yet has the insider’s incorruptible view of the German-German situation. He himself lived for four and a half years at the very heart of eastern Germany, even studying there. In a tattered place near the Polish border, as he puts it. In Berlin.
The Principle of Repulsion
He has no longing whatsoever for that capital city, even if he would have liked to see his “Party” in the local Bundestag – but the returning officer knew how to prevent that. So for the moment Fischer is staying on the Main, stubbornly prophesying that, “Berlin still has a long way to go before it’s a metropolis!” And anyway, the seat of government is unrewarding for satirists. When everyone is an artist, a dreamer or a fantasist, there’s no real source of friction. What should you be repelled by?” Repulsion, that important Titanic-criterion, is something he feels much more strongly here in Frankfurt, where humour can thrive on a fruitful soil: “Satire is something urban, something metropolitan.” The Regensburger obviously feels at home in this “inspiring global city with its mature bourgeois structure” and its idyllically rural districts. What is more, the people of Frankfurt and of the Upper Palatinate are known to have similarities: “Easily offended, easily insulted. And I detect a disinclination to be hospitable.” His Titanic is a Frankfurt plant which would surely not thrive in another city. “Here you have the towers of the Deutsche Bank, here you know exactly what is up and what is down.” That is, repulsive, and gorgeous.
The subscriber numbers are rising thanks to the online portal
The very young editor-in-chief has a sensitive and altogether successful editorial strategy in which select subscribers play a major role. “We put the magazine together just for ourselves. We’re not really interested in the readers. We just give away a part of our monthly production – that’s what we are offering Germany.” Those who are flattered by this delight in the attitude. Fischer produces 100,000 copies of Titanic every month, and the subscriber numbers are significantly higher than in the founding years, even though the magazine is no longer available at every newspaper stand. Many younger readers discover the magazine and its very special kind of humour not in newspaper shops but while surfing the online version of same. “I often hear people say, ‘Does that still exist!’?” Fischer himself began as an author for the online portal and has meantime fully digitised the magazine. The editors twitter clever things, fill Facebook with nonsense and broadcast the earthy stories of Wildbach-Toni on a YouTube channel. “The aim is to subjugate all the media – as they come.”
Satire as a dialectical negation of PR
Fischer studied philosophy and has a precise idea of what constitutes humour. “Satire can be understood as anti-PR, the dialectical negation of PR, if you will,” so the head satirist from the Sophienstrasse, quasi citing the greats of the Frankfurt School. His career with the leading German-language satirical magazine has been illustrious: he began as an easy-going author who sent light-hearted texts to the Sophienstrasse: “They are either accepted or rejected – it’s an all-or-nothing system.” Then came an internship at the modestly sized editorial office in a ground floor flat in Bockenheim, and then a traineeship. The publisher refused to let him have business cards at the time, after all, the trainee was to be appointed editor-in-chief as soon as possible. He has been just that for one whole year now – but he’s still waiting for the business cards. Whether he will ever get any is questionable, as that executive chair with a view of the north wall of the Bockenheim university campus is an ejector seat. “After five years, the person is jaded, no matter who it is.” And the fact is that no captain has actually been able to steer the Titanic for much longer than two times thirty months – when Fischer disembarks, the ship will be doomed. “Everything that comes after that will be worse” – something that doesn’t cause the 28-year-old professional satirist much grief. “That’s just great: I’ll have lived decently for five years at least.”
Harald Ille
[Published in English on January 15th, 2010. Translated by Pauline Cumbers.]
