In a sea of bikini-clad models and vacant celebrities, the hand-drawn illustrations of Germany's Der Spiegel magazine have a unique appeal

When Saddam Hussein was discovered in his hideaway by US troops in December 2003, the editors of Time magazine took the dramatic decision to pulp more than a million copies of the title. The planned cover image of Jesus Christ announcing a weighty piece on the interpretation of ancient biblical texts had to be replaced by something more newsworthy. The radiant messiah gave way to the heavily bearded, wild-eyed Iraqi dictator with the line "We got him". An inspired hand-drawn illustration lost out to a hastily snatched photograph.

This is a vivid example of the dilemma of the weekly news magazine: how to be topical in a world where other media offer real-time reports on fast-changing events. This burden has killed off most of the great photo-journals of the 20th century, including Life, a mainstay of American publishing that disappeared from the news-stands at the end of the Vietnam war. When television became a ubiquitous presence in American homes, Life's founding promise to turn the reader into an "eyewitness of great events" lost its force. In turn, Life lost its readers.

To compete in a saturated media market, current affairs weeklies promise their readers calm analysis after stormy events or on slower economic and political processes that lack the spectacular qualities of "the news". The promise of analysis is also made in the kind of cover images employed by these titles. A feature of Time is the portrait of the man, sometimes woman, "of the hour", suggesting deep insight into the minds of our heroes and villains. By contrast, the liberal German weekly Der Spiegel has a tradition of sophisticated illustrations that comment, like its editorial content, on world events. A selection of these images is presented in The Art of Der Spiegel, a new book accompanying a touring exhibition, in a shrewd attempt to promote the magazine as high culture.

The origins of Der Spiegel lie in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the allied forces occupying Germany had the idea of publishing a magazine that would deliver objective news. Corrupted and distorted by Nazi rule, the German press had been an organ of the state. If West Germany was to become a functioning democracy again, it needed a free and critical press. Much to the annoyance of the British government, the resulting magazine, Diese Woche, immediately set about criticising the rule of the occupiers. The allies removed the thorn in their side by handing over the publishing licence to a team of young German journalists who, in 1947, renamed the magazine Der Spiegel.

The weekly maintained its campaigning stance and established a reputation for investigative journalism. In 1962, it was at the centre of a political crisis known as the Spiegel Affair, which tested democracy in West Germany. Accused of treason for reporting the failings of the German army, the editor and publisher of Der Spiegel were put on trial and imprisoned, and police occupied the magazine's offices for more than a month. These events triggered protests across West Germany and abroad. Eventually, the defence minister, Franz Josef Strauss, was forced to admit to having used the weight of the state to limit press freedom. Der Spiegel emerged from the scandal with renewed authority as a check on the hubris of Germany's political leaders.

For the first ten years or so, the magazine's cover images owed much to Time's "man of the moment" format, as did the red frame and forceful masthead. But under the art director Eberhardt Wachsmuth, Der Spiegel began to commission illustrators to produce beautifully drawn editorialising images. First turning to the US, where the illustrated cover had been well established before the war by titles such as Conde Nast's Vanity Fair and Henry Luce's Fortune, Wachsmuth then began to foster a generation of home-grown talent, including Hermann Degkwitz and Ursula Arriens. Their assured images matched the magazine's confidence after the Spiegel Affair.

Degkwitz's illustrations are particularly striking. Working for Der Spiegel from 1967 to 1995, he combined fine draughtsmanship with the visual wit usually generated by a political cartoonist in a few quick marks of the pen. In 1969, in a cover image on the theme of Soviet perceptions of Germany, he drew portraits of leading politicians under a magnifying glass in the form of a hammer and sickle. In a provocative gesture resolved only by the cover line "Moscow's view of the Germans", each figure was given Hitler-like features and swastikas on their collars.

But does this and Der Spiegel's other covers count as art? Interestingly, when the magazine commissioned artists rather than illustrators, it ran into trouble. In the late 1970s, the editors asked the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys to generate a cover image to accompany an article on his work. What Beuys delivered is only hinted at by Wachsmuth's description: "It was total chaos."

Good cover illustration, stripped of the captions and one-line tasters that signal what lies inside the magazine, may seem like good art, but they are not the same. Take a cover produced by Robert Rodriguez during the US presidential election of 2000. In a parody of Emanuel Leutze's painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), it depicts the then president, Bill Clinton, on the prow of a boat breaking through the ice, with the American flag unfurling behind. The dawn light illuminates his noble profile, and lined up behind him are Al Gore, George W Bush, Hillary Clinton and other symbols of American success such as the athlete Marion Jones and the film director Steven Spielberg. As art, this image is little more than kitsch. But accompanied by the cover line "Where is America heading?", it has significant force, calling into question Clinton's place in history, American nostalgia and the relationship of politics to entertainment.

Similarly, in 2002, in the early days of the "war on terror", Jean-Pierre Kunkel depicted George Bush as Rambo, surrounded by his inner circle in various Hollywood costumes (including Donald Rumsfeld as Conan the Barbarian and Dick Cheney as the Terminator), with the cover line "Bush's warriors". A steel pretzel hangs on the president's muscular chest, a poignant reminder of the light snack that came close to defeating the world's most powerful man. Like Rodriguez's image of Clinton, this cover draws on the power of pastiche. Bizarrely, it was very popular among Bush's staff, who requested blow-ups with which to decorate their offices. It seems the irony of Kunkel's cover passed them by in the testosterone-fuelled culture of the White House.

Art or not, Der Spiegel has made far more imaginative use of the cover than almost any other title, serving as a reminder of the visual conservatism of most magazine publishing in Britain today. In the sea of bikini-clad models and vacant celebrities, the hand-drawn image is a luxury that few magazines seem able to afford.

The Art of Der Spiegel: cover illustrations over five decades, edited by Stefan Aust and Stefan Kiefer, is published by Te Neues (£25). The exhibition tours Germany and ends at the Museum of American Illustration in New York in January 2006

David Crowley teaches the history of design at the Royal College of Art and is author of Magazine Covers (Mitchell Beazley)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website