The End of Emma: Alice Schwarzer Folds Her Feminist Monument

When a media institution that survived nearly half a century decides to close its doors, one usually expects the familiar eulogy of market forces and digital destruction. Yet when Alice Schwarzer announced the end of her feminist magazine Emma, the explanation was characteristically sharp. The 83-year-old publisher made it clear that financial collapse was not the trigger for the final issue, scheduled for December 8. Revenue, according to Schwarzer, still covers costs despite declining sales. Instead, the departure is a deliberate choice, driven by the view that the publication has fulfilled its purpose.

The decision brings down the curtain on a publication that first appeared on January 26, 1977, established explicitly as a counterweight to what was then termed male-dominated media. Over five decades, operating out of Cologne, the editorial team tackled subjects long before they entered mainstream awareness, including spousal tax splitting, breast cancer, child sexual abuse, and the rise of Islamism. Yet Emma was always a tightly controlled vessel. Schwarzer’s brief attempt to pass chief editorial duties to Lisa Ortgies in 2008 collapsed quickly into internal disagreement, and subsequent searches for a successor yielded little interest from younger journalists, who preferred established mainstream outlets.

In her final years at the helm, Schwarzer’s stubborn independence put her directly at odds with emerging modern orthodoxies in Germany. Her public calls for quick peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia following the outbreak of war triggered sharp pushback, costing the magazine one in five subscribers through protest cancellations. Her criticism of prevailing trans ideology similarly highlighted a growing divide over the boundaries of acceptable debate in public life. For Schwarzer, maintaining space for dissenting positions was non-negotiable—a stance that increasingly isolated the magazine from contemporary progressive circles.

The contrast with the early decades could hardly be starker. Starting from modest offices at Kolpingplatz and later moving to the medieval Bayenturm in Cologne, the magazine reflected a period that Schwarzer remembered as marked by freedom and exuberance, long before the arrival of digital self-surveillance or social media pressures. With the complete archive now slated for transfer to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, five decades of feminist controversy will officially enter the national historical record. The end of Emma marks not merely the retirement of a veteran publisher, but the quiet admission that a once-formidable media project has simply run out of heirs.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com