STERN.de

Stern is an illustrated, broadly left-liberal, weekly current affairs magazine published in Hamburg, Germany, by Gruner + Jahr, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. Under the editorship of its founder Henri Nannen, it attained a circulation of between 1.5 and 1.8 million, the largest in Europe for a magazine of its kind. Unusually for a popular magazine in post-war West Germany, and most notably in the contributions to 1975 of Sebastian Haffner, Stern investigated the origin and nature of the preceding tragedies of German history. In 1983, however, its credibility was seriously damaged by its purchase and syndication of the forged Hitler Diaries. A sharp drop in sales anticipated the general fall in newsprint readership in the new century. By 2025, print circulation had fallen to 265,000. However, Stern's profile and readership has been substantially raised by its new digital offerings, including its website, app, and video formats.