Founded in 1947, the Merkur is published for more than sixty years – an exceptionally long life for a German cultural magazine.

A politically liberal and ironic intellectual institution, the Merkur gladly pokes fun at the intellectual world’s sterile excitement. The good old enlightenment values of criticism, skepticism, and sarcasm are employed against obtuseness and utopianism.

The Merkur was never an organ of a political party or of a particular world view, which means its readership cannot be defined by political or aesthetic criteria. Quite the opposite. Astute contradiction of the prevailing opinion (and even of the editors’) belongs to the magazine’s mandate.

The Merkur is not an academic magazine (though most of its readers have academic backgrounds, and many of its authors are university folk). It addresses a knowledgeable, open-minded, curious audience uninterested in merely having its opinion reaffirmed. This group was once called the educated bourgeoisie.

The Merkur is a classic cultural magazine, in which the political and the cultural-aesthetic, to name two of the central themes, are not pitted against but rather paired excitingly with one another. The Humboldtian idea of a well-rounded person naturally is at the heart of this combination – a venerable and all but anachronistic concept.

The Merkur does not consider itself voiceless, and it is not an archive of humanistic educational ideas; every month’s issue objectifies these claims. This cannot succeed as a type of loftier Reader’s Digest, as a smorgasbord of somehow interesting articles, nor as an expert magazine obliged to a narrow subject matter. Every subject can appear on the pages of Merkur, so long as it fulfils three conditions: intellectually original but not necessarily scholarly, relevant for educated but not specifically oriented readers, and presented in elegant essayistic form without academic fluff. The Merkur devotes its energy to composing a coherent melody from a wide variety of articles that communicate with, support, or contradict one another.

A publication like the Merkur is molded by its editors: Hans Paeschke and Joachim Moras (died 1961) from 1947 to 1978, Hans Schwab-Felisch from 1979 to 1983, Karl Heinz Bohrer since 1984, and Kurt Scheel at Bohrer’s side since 1991. Being editor means finding important topics and excellent authors, but that is only possible with solid economic backing. Since 1968, the Merkur has been supported by the Verlag Klett-Cotta, which established the Ernst H. Klett Foundation Merkur in 1978, thereby ensuring the magazine’s existence and independence.

For more than sixty years, the Merkur has set the standard in German political and cultural essayistic publications. The editorial staff’s move to Berlin in 1998 only strengthens its claim of remaining Germany’s definitive cultural magazine in the future.

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