By NIKLAS MAAK

That’s the way it goes in German journalism: someone comes around and says, “Hey, we really need to make a new magazine.” But before he’s finished the sentence, everyone else, while trying to hide their laughter, is like, “Yeah, yeah, let me guess: a mixture of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker,” which really means: “Yeah, sorry, that would never work here. That’s what we all want, but nobody can do it.” So when Vanity Fair wanted to start something in Germany, a mixture of Vanity Fair and, well, Vanity Fair, dead silence came over the crowd for a moment. And now that the project has ultimately gone belly up, the would-never-work analysts are resurfacing again. What’s obvious: the decision to make it a weekly rather than a monthly was fatal, because the unglamorous understaffing meant that a reporter would have barely boarded a plane before his text had to be completed.

When you enter in the word glamour into Google, the first result is a question: “Fancy trying out new hairstyle trends?” This describes quite accurately the problem that Germany has with this word/concept, which is that glamour doesn’t really take place in your head. But that doesn’t mean there’s no glamour here. It’s just that the pursuit of it in Germany is generally an unfortunate affair. On the one hand, it develops into an annoying neo-liberal Teutonic we-are-here-horn-tooting with dodgy references (fashion by Michalsky?). On the other hand, it cultivates the whiny ritual of self-attrition: they have Obama, and all we’ve got is Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg; all they have to do is drive due west and they end up in L.A., when we start driving west from Cologne we end up in some place called Quadrath-Ichendorf. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t create a good Vanity Fair here.

There was a strange amount of elation abroad about the failure of Vanity Fair Germany, but people here had greater objections than elsewhere. Namely, the weak combination of glamour and “great reportage” compared to the American edition, with its successful mix of political awareness with the simple enjoyment of pretty pictures of pretty people on pretty beaches. The remarkable claim of incompatibility, i.e., the schism of amusement and accountability, or entertainment and awareness, impacts the public discourse in Germany the same way it produces problems in other areas: the disaster of environmental products, from the eco-auto to the zero-energy house, also lies in the fact that Germans indulge in a decided aesthetic of austereness. They demand penance for past environmental sins instead of talking about the freedom of eradicating some things and doing others differently. And a magazine like Vanity Fair, which could present matters in a manner far beyond the ideological blockades of the green issue – a series of flashy eco-gizmos and green mindsets – could have been the anti-serum rather than the worst of the worst.

Of course in Germany we desperately need a magazine like Vanity Fair – and the fact that nobody realized what it meant while it was here may be because there was way too little Vanity Fair in Vanity Fair. The decision-makers had decided that readers were much dumber than they actually were. For instance, they sent a reporter to the Gaza Strip, and she came back with an amazing reportage of two Palestinian women: one a member of Fatah, and the other closer to Hamas. The story described the complicated situation within the Gaza Strip with a clarity that someone could achieve only if they had traveled there with a good photographer, observed the whole situation, and wrote it down in necessary length. The story was ready, but according to an employee, it had to be radically abridged to make room for a piece about German sexuality – the type of story nobody will buy a magazine for, and the type that, in hindsight, even the perfunctory copy editors determined nearly unreadable. The editorial staff said they wanted to reach a broader audience with the topic; but unfortunately they missed the point. Just because Focus was successful at some point with this sort of self-help journalism doesn’t mean it automatically works for other publications.

The collapse of Vanity Fair, in spite of its grandiose editorial department, may also have to do with the fact that, in the end, people believed less and less in the project. Vanity Fair became one of these operations with a bunch of consultants, together with chief loser Bernd Runge, sitting around a PowerPoint presentation about reading behaviors, banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out what the readers really want. Maybe it would have been better to simply forget about market research and put their money on poise and decisiveness – on breaking with the status quo and having an original idea. An idea that was so different, in which the circumstances were so rousing, that readers would come on their own because they felt like they were experiencing something they couldn’t get elsewhere.

That was the secret of American Vanity Fair’s success, and also its authentic glamour. This is the magazine that broke the story about manipulating voting machines in the 2004 election, which in part led to tighter controls on the voting machines in 2008 And in the same issue, there’s an amazing story about the painter and millionaire who financed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s excesses. The magazine opened a door into a world that you immediately wanted to enter.

Certain formats produce the content that these formats presuppose: before the Futurist Manifesto, there was no Futurism to talk about. And if American Vanity Fair never existed, many stories would have never happened. The glamour lies in the self-confidence of being able to say: “There’s a whole other way you could see your city, your country, your life” – totally different, not just a little bit of redecorating or a new hairdo or skillfully disguised wrinkles.

There’s certainly more than enough topics in Germany to produce large-scale glamorous reporting. There are big, untapped stories that are more enthralling than a crime novel: within the discussion of climate change, everyone talks about privately owned vehicles, but nobody’s talking about the millions of commercial vehicles that are supplanting railroads more and more. Why doesn’t anyone write about the influence of the trucking lobby in politics, the men behind the scenes, the million-euro deals, the extortion? And nobody even mentions why the Germans bore Albert Speer’s lies for so long after 45, why they so willingly believed the lies, how he and the bourgeoisie were allegedly seduced, and what these lies could mean for the supposed bourgeoisie.

The most important role of a magazine like Vanity Fair would have been to redraw the map of relevant themes and faces in Germany. There are artists and architects and amazing actors and directors and young politicians who desperately need to be discovered and celebrated; whose faces could very nicely fit on a cover, or in a centerfold, if the accompanying text justified why it’s so important, or interesting, or life-changing to see what these people are doing. Instead, again and again, we got the same cover heroes from 1991: Til Schweiger with a lamb in his arms, Veronica Ferres holding Carsten Maschmeyer’s hand. Why? Because someone thought that’s what readers wanted. Spiegel readers aren’t the only ones who want to know more; perhaps that was the problem with Vanity Fair Germany.

In the final issue there’s a story about the young actor David Kross with an excellent Berlinale journal that reads more like a short story on the fi lm festival, and talks about the new Berlin and the last year of the 2000s. Excluding photos, it spanned five pages, and could have easily been longer, as the story created an experience that only magazines can produce. Imagine continuing on from this point – a magazine with only these types of stories.