History, one of three
Switzerland had spent six years trying to strangle the newspaper that put her on its front page. Knowing what BLICK was in 1965 changes how you read what it printed.
When Swiss readers opened BLICK on 25 November 1965 and saw the front page asking why the police would not look for the "golden caged bird," they were reading a newspaper that Switzerland had spent six years trying to strangle.
That is not a figure of speech. The advertisers boycotted it. Students burned it in three cities. A church council petitioned the federal government to have it removed from railway kiosks. The Federal Council itself concluded the paper was bad for the population's mental resilience, and then admitted it had no legal power to do anything about it.
Understanding what BLICK was in 1965 changes how you read what it printed.
BLICK was founded in Zurich and published its first issue on 14 October 1959. It was Switzerland's first Boulevardblatt, the German term for a tabloid.[1]
The first issue ran six pages, cost 20 Rappen, and led with the headline "Der Diener ist nicht der Mörder" (The servant is not the murderer).[2] Sources disagree slightly on the print run: BLICK's own anniversary coverage says 48,000 copies, while the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says it launched with 50,000.<sup>[1][2]</sup> Call it roughly fifty thousand.
The editorial formula was explicit. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes its emphasis as "accidents and crime, sex and sport," and notes the paper "wanted above all to entertain its readers."[1] The in-house motto, per the publisher's own corporate history, was "Du darfst alles ausser langweilen": you may do anything except be boring.[3]
There is a wrinkle worth noting about who actually created it. BLICK's own 60th-anniversary account credits the idea to the Munich publisher Helmut Kindler, who had founded the German youth magazine Bravo in 1956, and says Kindler was the majority shareholder while Ringier stayed in the background as only the second-largest shareholder.[2] Ringier's corporate history tells it differently, presenting BLICK straightforwardly as a Ringier launch.[3] Both versions are on the record and they do not agree.
The reaction was not ordinary media criticism. It was an organised attempt to shut the paper out of Swiss life.
The advertisers boycotted it. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland states plainly that BLICK "was initially boycotted by the advertisers' associations."[1] This is the best-attested of all the hostility claims, coming from a scholarly reference work rather than from the paper's own retrospective.
Students burned it. Public burnings took place in Zurich, Bern and Lucerne, with the paper carried symbolically to a grave in a black coffin and placards reading "Jeder Trottel liest den Blick" (Every idiot reads Blick).<sup>[2][4]</sup> Sources conflict on when: BLICK says roughly two weeks after launch, swissinfo says two months.<sup>[2][4]</sup> The event is corroborated by an outlet independent of the publisher; the interval is not settled, so no precise figure should be quoted.
The publishers' association went after distribution, asking the Swiss federal railways to prevent sales at station kiosks.[5]
The church reportedly petitioned the government. BLICK's own anniversary coverage says that in 1960 the reformed church council of Basel-Landschaft filed a submission with the Federal Council asking that the kiosk administration and the railways prevent "the distribution of such objectionable press organs."[2] Treat this as unconfirmed. A second independent research pass could locate no source for church opposition to BLICK in this period. The only account is the newspaper's own retrospective, which has an obvious interest in dramatising the hostility it once faced.
The government agreed and said it was powerless. The Federal Council replied that it feared BLICK had "a bad influence on the mental attitude and resilience of its readers," but that it possessed no legal means to intervene, a ban being impossible on press-freedom grounds.<sup>[2][6]</sup>
So it retaliated indirectly. The federal administration was placed under an information embargo forbidding officials to speak to BLICK journalists, and the postal administration withdrew from Ringier the contract to print the Swiss telephone directories.<sup>[3][6]</sup> The publisher's own history concedes the loss of the directory contract, which makes it credible.
A note on rigour: the reported parliamentary interventions in the Nationalrat in 1961 and 1962, including an Anfrage attributed to Nationalrat Carl Eder in 1962, rest on BLICK's own retrospective account. The corresponding Amtliches Bulletin record has not been located. Treat as unconfirmed pending archival verification.[2]
Here is the fact that matters most for reading any Swiss newspaper of 1965, and it is easy to miss.
Switzerland had no press council. No body existed to which a reader, a subject, or an injured family could take a complaint about press conduct. The Swiss journalists' association only took a preliminary decision to pursue self-regulation in 1968, began drafting a code of honour in November 1969, and had that draft sent back by its own delegates in 1970 over a dispute about a "right to information."[7] A declaration of duties and rights was adopted only on 17 June 1972, and the Swiss Press Council itself was not established until 1977, initially by journalists alone, with publishers declining to take part.[7]
Germany was ahead, and not by much in practice. The Deutscher Presserat was founded on 20 November 1956, but it had no press code at all until September 1973. Before that, complaints were judged against case-by-case guidelines built up from individual rulings.[8] Scholarship on the period finds the German council examined mainly illustrated magazines into the 1960s and functioned chiefly as a defender of press interests against the state, with genuine self-control becoming its focus only after a 1969 reorganisation.[9]
So when Swiss and German papers reported on a seventeen-year-old girl in November 1965, printing her photograph, her nickname, her family's finances and her mother's accusations, there was no professional body in either country with a code to apply or a complaint to hear.
That is not a reason to discount what they printed. It is a reason to remember that nothing external disciplined it either.
By the time BLICK put the missing Swiss heiress on its front page, the paper had won.
The best-documented circulation figure of the era comes from October 1961: a print run of 120,000, with the Swiss advertising association certifying net paid circulation of 97,727 copies, making BLICK the second-largest newspaper in Switzerland. Both the paper and Ringier's corporate history give the same audited number.<sup>[2][3]</sup> By 1967 it passed 200,000 and became the country's largest daily, though the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland dates that threshold closer to 1969.<sup>[1][2]</sup> The likely explanation is print run versus audited sales, but that reconciliation is inference, not sourced fact.
So the Hitz case reached the Swiss public in November 1965 through a paper that was six years old, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand copies a day, commercially triumphant, and still regarded by the Swiss establishment as a moral problem.
This cuts both ways, and honesty requires saying both.
Against the source: a paper whose declared business was crime, sex and sensation had every commercial reason to inflate a story about a missing seventeen-year-old heiress and a disputed fortune. The wide range in reported estimates of the Hitz estate across European papers, from 40 million to 150 million francs, is exactly what one expects from competitive tabloid reporting.
For the source: BLICK was also the paper willing to print that the Washington police had declined to open an official search, and to name the Swiss guardianship authorities in Graubünden at a time when the respectable Swiss press was not interested. Establishment papers do not always cover establishment failures. Sometimes the scandal sheet is the only one asking.
The correct reading of a 1965 BLICK article is therefore neither to trust it nor dismiss it, but to treat it as what it was: a commercially aggressive newspaper, hostile to Swiss officialdom and hostile to being ignored, reporting a story that Swiss officialdom would have preferred to leave alone.
Further archival sources not yet consulted: Saxer, U. et al., 20 Jahre Blick (1979); Blick, Immer dabei!, ed. J. Bürgi (1984); Uebersax, P., Blick zurück (1995).
Part of a series on the world the Hitz case happened in. No family testimony is used in these pieces, and no allegation about any named individual appears in them. Where sources conflict, the conflict is shown rather than resolved. See the whole series.