Bild, Merkel and the culture wars: the inside story of Germany’s biggest tabloid
‘It would be ideal if you could hit a deer,” Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of Europe’s largest tabloid, Bild Zeitung, told his chauffeur. “Guardian readers could do with a bit more colour.” We had reached escape velocity out of ice-encrusted Düsseldorf. The Mercedes S-Class locked into place like a bobsled on the Autobahn. I sat shotgun with Reichelt’s assortment of sports gear, a hockey stick between my legs. “We are lucky in our driver today,” Reichelt said, deadpan. “Last time we hit a wild boar and the boar and the car went flying.”
I was travelling with Reichelt on one of his publicity tours across Germany. For the past two years, he has made an appointment once a month to commune with groups of Bild’s 1.3 million readers. “You have to feel their emotions,” he told me from the backseat. “You have to listen to their hearts.”
Reichelt, who is 40, made his name as a war reporter in Syria, but today confines most of his battle courage to Twitter, where he enjoys needling the German political establishment and barging into leftwing echo chambers. In person, Reichelt exudes a twitchy exuberance, like a fighter pilot who has managed to smuggle champagne into the cockpit. His eyes restlessly gauge the world around him, clocking who he needs to avoid and who he needs to attract. Into his phone, he volleys directives to subeditors, assistants and the band of young male disciples he sends around the world to collect stories. “The leading populist in western Germany,” is how Albrecht von Lucke, editor of the prestigious left-liberal monthly Blätter, describes him.
Available at train stations, supermarkets, bakeries, kiosks, factories, Portuguese beach resorts, online, and everywhere else Germans buy things, Bild Zeitung squats like a large toad on German life. Bild, which was partly modelled on the Daily Mirror, is the largest newsprint publication in the world that uses Roman characters. Unlike its closest analogue in Britain, the Daily Mail, it has no real national competitors. Twenty regional editions seep into every pore of the country. Each month, its website attracts about 25 million readers. Bild is the prize battleship of Axel Springer, the German company founded in 1945 by the rightwing publisher of the same name. Today, Axel Springer is the largest media publishing firm in Europe, and is valued at about €7bn. Last year, the US private equity firm KKR acquired a 44% stake in the company.
For decades, Bild was an object of scorn for any self-respecting West German of social democratic orientation. In a political culture more conformist and decorous than most of its western peers, Bild functioned like the Las Vegas strip, concentrating all of the Federal Republic’s seediness in one place. Seven days a week, Bild pumped free-market mantras, alongside ads for car tyres and chicken wings, into the stiff arteries of cold war West Germany. Bild decried long hair on men and the marriage of its top models to foreigners. It genuflected before South African apartheid, Greek dictatorship, Bavarian sedans and American Pershing missiles. Above all, Bild dedicated itself to the destruction of communist East Germany, and fought a long battle against what it viewed as enemy collaborators in the leftist student movement at home.
Such was the stature of Bild in West Germany that in 1965, after the daily rose in price from 10 to 15 pfennigs, Axel Springer, who referred to Bild as his “dog on a chain”, proposed to Chancellor Ludwig Erhard that the state introduce a special 15 pfennig coin to make it easier to purchase the paper. Meanwhile, the East German Stasi was so impressed by Bild as a state propaganda tool that it crafted its own – imaginatively titled – NEUE Bild Zeitung, which was sold at the border with West Germany, where it conspicuously failed to wean class enemies off the original.
