About Guter Rat

Guter Rat

Guter Rat — "Good Advice" — is Germany's oldest continuously published post-war magazine. Founded in November 1945 in the Soviet occupation zone and published in the GDR until 1990, it survived reunification to become a modern monthly consumer magazine, today published in Berlin by the SUPERillu Verlag of Hubert Burda Media. Its self-description, "das unabhängige Verbrauchermagazin" (the independent consumer magazine), captures a title that has advised German households through scarcity, socialism and the consumer society alike.

Overview

The modern Guter Rat offers practical guidance on money, insurance, law, taxes, technology, health, cars and travel. Each monthly issue carries a cover theme treated in depth, alongside regular sections — Marktplatz (prices, products, news), Wirtschaften, Besser leben, Gesund bleiben, Mobil sein — and extensive tests and checks of products and services from all areas of life. The concept promises what the name has promised since 1945: credible, comprehensible, actionable and above all reliable advice, presented with clear tables and graphics so readers can form their own judgement. According to IVW, it is the business-press magazine with the highest sold circulation in its segment.

History

The magazine's birth is the stuff of publishing legend. On 21 November 1945, an employee of the Leipzig publishing house Otto Beyer received permission from the Soviet occupation authorities to publish a new magazine — according to tradition, a bottle of spirits helped the approval along. The name: Guter Rat für Haus und Kleid (good advice for house and clothing). The first issue addressed women who had to manage households on desperately scarce resources in the aftermath of war. Its topics were practical and close to life: how to sew children's clothes from old curtains, what to cook with parsley roots, how to get the stove working again before winter. One cover story bore the headline "Vaters Uniform hängt noch im Schrank: Wir arbeiten daraus Kostüme, Jacken, Röcke" — father's uniform still hangs in the wardrobe; we are making costumes, jackets and skirts from it.

In the GDR, Guter Rat became an indispensable companion for countless households. As an apolitical magazine it remained largely spared from censorship, yet it was so popular that it was often obtainable only through connections — the coveted magazine as Bückware, goods passed under the counter to those who knew someone in the shop. From 1946 it appeared under the roof of the Verlag für die Frau, the GDR's most important fashion and advice publisher, where it was the house's most important advice title — and remains, to this day, the only former title of that publishing house still in existence. The Verlag für die Frau published most of the GDR's advice and women's magazines — Für Dich, Sibylle, pramo, Handarbeit — but of all of them, only Guter Rat survived the end of the state that had created the publishing house. In the 1970s the magazine shifted toward a more gender-neutral orientation: alongside sewing tips there were now building instructions for furniture and furnishings.

Guter Rat is one of three East German magazines to have survived reunification, alongside the satirical Eulenspiegel and das Magazin. After 1989 the Gong Verlag took over the title and developed it into a general advice magazine; it then moved to Super Illu and became part of Hubert Burda Media around the turn of the millennium. The profile changed with the times: the socialist consumer magazine, which had once dispensed financial advice shaped by state policy — including the promotion of plastic goods in line with government campaigns — became a modern consumer title for the market economy. In June 2010 the magazine was redesigned to expand its coverage. In 2025 Burda marked its eightieth anniversary with a full retrospective under the headline "80 Jahre Guter Rat: Ein Magazin schreibt Geschichte" — eighty years of a magazine writing history, from post-war sewing tips to post-reunification orientation to tax advice in the digital age.

Content and Concept

The monthly e-paper edition, available through digital newsstands such as iKiosk as well as in print, illustrates the concept: extensive tests and checks of products and services, independent expert guidance before purchase decisions, and the recurring questions of modern consumer life. What should you watch for when buying a computer? What benefits do different health insurers offer? Which bank charges fees for cash withdrawals? Which sunscreen is most effective? How do you save fuel with the latest car models? The magazine's specialist editors sift, sort and prioritise the flood of information and prepare it so that readers receive trustworthy, traceable advice.

The editorial stance is that of the critical consumer's ally. The magazine holds that consumers face ever more complex decisions day by day, and that competent, reliable support in making them is a journalistic duty. The presentation — tables, graphics, checklists — serves readers who want to compare and decide for themselves rather than be told what to think.

Coverage and Audience

IVW figures for the fourth quarter of 2024 record a sold circulation of 68,691 copies with 69,584 distributed — down from 193,784 in the fourth quarter of 2014, a decline that mirrors the structural pressures on German print media, yet still the segment's leader. The readership remains strongest in eastern Germany, where the title's eighty-year history gives it a recognition and trust few western titles can match. Few magazines anywhere can claim to have advised readers under three German states — the Soviet occupation zone, the GDR and the Federal Republic — and to have remained, through all of them, recognisably the same promise: good advice, independently given. That continuity, across eighty years of German history, is the title's unique selling proposition, and the reason its publisher celebrated it as a magazine that wrote history. The editor-in-chief is Stefan Kobus (earlier editors included Werner Zedler, appointed in 1998, and Robert Schneider), the managing director is Heinz Scheiner, and the print edition carries the ISSN 0017-582X.

Ownership

Guter Rat is published by the SUPERillu Verlag in Berlin, part of Hubert Burda Media — the Offenburg-based media group founded in 1903, today one of Germany's largest publishing houses with brands including Bunte, Superillu, Freundin, InStyle, Focus and Chip alongside digital businesses such as HolidayCheck and XING. Within Burda's portfolio, Guter Rat sits in the consumer-advice segment, published by the BurdaVerlag Publishing GmbH. The journey from the Leipzig Otto Beyer Verlag through the GDR's Verlag für die Frau, the Gong Verlag and Super Illu to Burda reflects the magazine's extraordinary institutional biography: few German titles have been published under so many different economic systems.

Digital Presence

The magazine operates its website at guter-rat.de and is available as a monthly e-paper — readable online and downloadable as PDF — through platforms such as iKiosk. The digital edition carries the full print content: the monthly cover theme, the tests and checks, and the regular sections from Marktplatz to Mobil sein. Subscription offers, including premium subscriptions with vouchers, half-year, mini and gift subscriptions, are sold through the usual German subscription channels — a two-year premium subscription was recently offered at around 100 euros with a 20-euro voucher, the standard mechanics of the German subscription market. Eighty years after a Leipzig publisher's employee talked the Soviet authorities into a licence, Guter Rat continues to do what its first issue did: to help German households make better decisions — only the questions have changed, from darning uniforms to choosing health insurance. The magazine's survival across eight decades — through war, division, reunification and the digital revolution — makes it one of the most remarkable continuities in German publishing.