Mid-century Magazine Culture in the US and Germany: ‘Illustrierte’ Between Market, Ideology, and the Public

Organized by Pop-Archive Münster (https://www.uni-muenster.de/Kulturpoetik/medienarchive/pop-archiv/) and the Mainz-based Research Initiative Transnational Periodical Cultures (http://www.transnationalperiodicalcultures.net)

Conference: Münster—Mainz, March 11–13, 2027

The 1950s can be read as a period of competing visions of modernity, in which political bloc confrontation, consumer culture, technological euphoria, and cultural self-assurance overlapped. Magazines functioned as a central media form in this context: they structured perceptions, organized knowledge, produced social imaginaries, shaped public opinion, and established aesthetic orders of everyday life, disseminating trends, and reflecting (or challenging) the social norms of the decade. Magazines as a serially structured and materially specific medium, featuring an interplay of ads and editorial content as well as pictures and text, played a decisive role in shaping the cultural public spheres of the mid-century.

Both, in the US and in Europe, the 1950s mark the beginning of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of magazine publishing with magazines representing important sites for literary, cultural, and political debate and innovation. In the US, glossy titles like Life, Look, Vogue, Playboy, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic produced high-quality photography, which modernized the visual imagination as color reproduction improved. At the same time Swiss typography was popularized in periodicals, as much as Vogue publicized Dior’s New Look. In Western Germany, magazines (‘Illustrierte’) like Constanze, Hör zu!, Das Schönste, Reader’s Digest, Bravo, Rasselbande, magnum or twen produced visual and narrative models of everyday life, nation, gender, labor, consumption, and democracy, thereby contributing to the cultural self-description of their respective societies. In doing so, they constantly adopted, reflected, and negotiated their American models as well as the American way of life, within and outside the frameworks of re-education and cultural ‘westernization’. In the US, the ‘invention’ of the teenager is intimately tied to Seventeen, in Germany to Bravo. Ebony represented Black lifestyle and politics as an aspirational project and funneled civil rights into the mainstream press, while in the German edition of Reader’s Digest articles on Black culture have to be read alongside different paradigms (like colonialism and the racial ideology of Nazi Germany, which was only recently replaced by democratization processes in the early ‘Bundesrepublik’). While mail-order shopping rose as ads were placed in high-circulation publications, high culture magazines condemned, and Mad satirized, consumerism. German women adopted new post-war roles by reading Constanze; while Betty Friedan’s reading of 50s women’s magazines underwrote The Feminine Mystique (1963) which would spark Second Wave Feminism. Furthermore, we are interested in the various exchange processes between the US and Europe that shape the magazines in terms of form and personnel. For example, Russian book designer Alexey Brodovitch first designed European high class intellectual magazines such as the Parisian Cahiers d’Art, and then, after emigrating to the US, exerted a decisive influence on commercial European magazine culture as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Such intertwined constellations of import and re-import of magazine design practices will also be a subject at the planned conference.

The conference examines a broad range of magazines from the 1950s and 1960s circulated in the Federal Republic of Germany and the USA (with comparative glances at the GDR and Great Britain) from a cultural and media studies perspective. We will read magazines as specific medial formations—an ensemble of texts, images, layout, advertisements, periodicity, and institutional practices. The inquiry concerns the specific mediality of magazines and the role they play in producing competing public spheres within American and German post-war cultures. The focus is on the negotiations of German ‘westernization’ in different magazines from re-ed organs like Heute and Perspektiven to pop-cultural media like Bravo and twen.

Presentations at the conference will ideally combine a focus on the mediality of mid-century magazines with the cultural negotiations (of pop culture, music, cinema, the body, sports, fashion, design, politics, history, etc.) in those magazines.

Proposals (max. 2000 characters + short bionote) for 25-minute presentations (in English or German) should be submitted by June 15, 2026, to safazli@uni-mainz.de and philipp.pabst@uni-muenster.de 

The conference will take place between March 11 and 13, 2027, at the University of Münster. Results of the conference will be published in a bilingual collection of articles. Click here to download the flyer.

Organizers:

Moritz Bassler (mbassler@uni-muenster.de)

Sabina Fazli (safazli@uni-mainz.de)

Philipp Pabst (philipp.pabst@uni-muenster.de)

Oliver Scheiding (scheiding@uni-mainz.de)