December, 1980

Last October, in time to be the talk of the Book Fair in Frankfurt, a new magazine began to appear in Germany. A German-language edition of Cosmopolitan began to be seen on the newsstands too, and that fact, in its own way, is also a comment on the urbanity and internationalism of today's Federal Republic. But a more direct appeal to that particular kind of urbanity which is the hallmark of those classes at once moneyed and literate is made by Transatlantik (editorial address: Sternwartstrasse 4, 8000 Munich 80), the latest monthly from New Magazines Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H., the stable from which come also the photography magazine Photo and the soft-core glossy lui.

Transatlantik is a semi-glossy magazine clearly modelled on the New Yorker. Its page size is the same as that of the New Yorker. Like the New Yorker, it carries glossy ads for cars, hi-fi systems, liquor and cigarettes, but-again, like the New Yorker- its cover is never a photograph, but a drawing or painting. Just as the New Yorker prints its price as One Dollar, Transatlantik prints its as Acht Mark. Though most of its contents are in two broad columns, Transatlantik begins every issue with a section of miscellaneous contributions, titled 'Journal des Luxus und der Moden', which uses the three-column format of the New Yorker. Furthermore, Transatlantik uses a good deal of material reprinted in translation from the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, the New York Times, and the New York Review ...