Banality Fair

A Disappointing Launch for Condé Nast in Germany

By Markus Brauck

The German edition of Vanity Fair has been available on newsstands for half a year. Hailed as the biggest magazine debut here in years, the glossy is struggling to find its identity and get noticed.

Ulf Poschardt is "very happy." Or so he says. Everything is great: the print run, ad sales and the structure of those magazine issues he has produced so far as editor-in-chief of the German edition of Vanity Fair.

It's all going great, he says. "More or less," he adds, in English. He likes to use English expressions. They often sound better than their German equivalent. He used to wax eloquent about Germany's "movers and shakers." But he's doing a lot less of that these days -- he was getting ridiculed too often.

Then he yanks open the windows of his Berlin office in the sweltering heat. Two minutes later he closes them again because of the noisy traffic outside. It's too hot around him one moment and too loud the next -- more or less.

Somehow everything is going well, more or less. Keeping it vague makes it easier to feel jubilant. Nor does it seem to matter that the claim of having a sold print run of 120,000 makes other publishers raise their eyebrows, that recent issues featured few ads and that people in the business are whispering that the Condé Nast publishing house's showcase project is devouring about half a million euros ($670,000) a week.

Questions about the print run should be directed at the publishing house, an annoyed Poschardt eventually says. He adds that an extraordinary number of ads has been booked for the fall. More or less.

The conference room next to Poschardt's office features a large mosaic of the most successful cover images of German magazines from recent years. Stern and SPIEGEL covers are displayed there, but so are those of the lifestyle magazines Bunte and Gala. These are the classic paragons, and this is the league Poschardt originally wanted to play in, as an editor of one of Germany's well-established magazines. But his prospects for success aren't too promising.

Poschardt has heard the talk. He's familiar with the judgements passed by his colleagues, which tend to be merciless. "This is a marathon," he says. "I think it's a mistake to reach a final judgement on us after only the first leg of the race."