[Commlist] CFP Conference on Mid-century Magazine Culture

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

*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/* 
<https://www.uni-muenster.de/Kulturpoetik/medienarchive/pop-archiv/>)

and the Mainz-based Research Initiative Transnational Periodical 
Cultures *(http://www.transnationalperiodicalcultures.net)* 
<http://www.transnationalperiodicalcultures.net>

**

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 /at/ uni-mainz.de) and (philipp.pabst /at/ 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.

Organizers:

Moritz Bassler ((mbassler /at/ uni-muenster.de))

Sabina Fazli ((safazli /at/ uni-mainz.de))

Philipp Pabst ((philipp.pabst /at/ uni-muenster.de))

Oliver Scheiding ((scheiding /at/ uni-mainz.de) <mailto:(scheiding /at/ uni-mainz.de)>)


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