"ALBUM TITLE" (YEAR) Album Description:
Calling Hörzu a “music magazine” is like calling a Swiss Army knife a “cute little blade.” It did cover music, sure, but Hörzu was basically Germany’s weekly pop-culture control tower: radio/TV listings first, then celebrity, film, entertainment, and the kind of stuff families actually argued about on the couch.
Hörzu started in 1946 as a radio-program magazine and grew into a full-on mass-market institution as TV took over German living rooms. By the time West Germany was deep into the “we have a television now” era, Hörzu wasn’t just popular—it was ridiculous numbers popular. A historical media study notes it passed a million circulation by 1950 and hit about 4.2 million copies in 1962, with readership so high that “every third” West German was reading it; it also describes Hörzu as the highest-circulation magazine in Europe at the time, peaking around 1969 at roughly 4.3 million copies.
So what does that have to do with the 1970s and 1980s? Simple: the habits and infrastructure were already built, and those decades were basically “TV becomes the national fireplace.” In the 1970s, West Germany gets more television variety, color becomes normal, and the weekly programming magazine becomes a household tool—half planner, half gossip delivery system. Hörzu leaned into that: bigger visuals, more TV-star focus, and the “Goldene Kamera” TV award (started in 1965) as part of its celebrity gravity.
You can see the scale still hanging around into the late ’70s: the German Wikipedia entry lists a 1979 print run of 4,438,600 copies. That’s not “popular,” that’s “this thing lives in basically every waiting room and half the kitchens in the country.”
The 1980s are where the vibe shifts: more channels, more competition in TV magazines, and media tastes fragment. But Hörzu still carried main character energy because it wasn’t only schedules—it was a familiar weekly brand with a mascot (Mecki the hedgehog) and a very curated sense of cozy, mainstream entertainment.
Now, the actual music angle (because you asked, and I’m not dodging it): Hörzu also crossed into music directly through records. The English Wikipedia entry notes that Hörzu produced and released LPs from 1963 as a subsidiary associated with Electrola in Cologne, and in 1968 it launched a more progressive/avant-garde imprint called “HÖRZU Black.” So even though the magazine itself wasn’t a “music mag” in the modern sense, the brand absolutely had fingerprints on what people could buy and hear.
There’s also a sneaky cultural detail that screams 70s/80s popularity: cover art. The German Wikipedia entry points out that in the 1970s and 1980s, artist Jörn Meyer painted 65 Hörzu cover images in a naïve-painting style, and that this both boosted his career and helped the magazine’s popularity. That’s the kind of “weekly household object” flex you don’t get if you’re just another niche title.
Fast-forward context (just to anchor the “was it really that big?” question): Axel Springer’s own press material later bragged about Hörzu’s massive reach, describing it as a top weekly program magazine in Europe with millions of readers. Different era, same energy: this brand spent decades being structurally embedded in German media life.
So yeah: in the 1970s and early 1980s, Hörzu’s popularity wasn’t a trend—it was infrastructure. A weekly cultural dashboard for a country whose evenings increasingly revolved around broadcast schedules, big TV events, and whatever the shared mainstream was that week. And if you cared about music even a little, Hörzu still mattered—because TV, radio, and record-buying were all tangled together in the same living-room ecosystem.
