About Militär & Geschichte

Militär & Geschichte

Militär & Geschichte is a German special-interest magazine devoted to military history, published in Munich, Bavaria, by the GeraMond Verlag. Launched in January 2002 and published every two months since 2014, it presents articles by historians and specialist journalists on wars, battles, weapons technology, military units and the human fates caught between the fronts — from antiquity to the modern age, with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. With a sold circulation of around 29,000 copies and an exceptionally loyal, overwhelmingly male and well-educated readership, it is one of the most durable titles in Germany's niche segment of military-history publishing. Its official website is militaer-und-geschichte.de, and it is complemented by the annual special issue Militär & Geschichte Extra.

Overview

Militär & Geschichte is a bimonthly German-language magazine — ISSN 2199-1545 — published by the GeraMond Verlag GmbH in Munich. It is a classic special-interest title: not a news magazine and not an academic journal, but a richly illustrated popular-history publication that treats military history as serious, documented storytelling. The masthead's promise is "Bilder, Tatsachen, Hintergründe" — images, facts, background — and the magazine's presentation reflects it: historical documents, eyewitness reports, maps and extensive photographic material carry the articles, many of which are written by professional historians and specialist journalists.

The magazine has been published every two months since 2014; before that it appeared in the Pabel-Moewig Verlag. Since 2016 it has been accompanied by a regular special edition, Militär & Geschichte Extra, devoted to selected military-historically significant personalities. The editor-in-chief is Markus Wunderlich. The publisher, GeraMond, is part of the GeraNova Bruckmann Verlagshaus — the newsletter legal notice of the magazine's own website names the GeraNova Bruckmann Verlagshaus GmbH of Infanteriestraße 11a, 80797 München as the data controller, confirming the Munich publishing home.

History

The magazine's history begins in January 2002 with its first issue, published at the time by the Pabel-Moewig Verlag, one of Germany's large publishers of popular fiction and special-interest titles. The early 2000s were a period of unusual stability for the segment: while the print market as a whole was beginning its long decline, magazines about wars, military history and weaponry were, as the evangelische-friedensarbeit.de reported in an epd feature, selling comparatively steadily — especially in railway-station bookshops, where dozens of such magazines and booklets were on offer. An epd survey of the segment noted that more than 93 percent of Militär & Geschichte's readers at the time had been with the magazine since its founding in 2002 — an extraordinary loyalty figure for any print title.

In 2014 the magazine moved to the GeraMond Verlag and switched to a bimonthly rhythm. GeraMond, a Munich specialist publisher of railway, model, military and history titles within the GeraNova Bruckmann group, was a natural home: the house also publishes the military-history magazine Clausewitz, which appears six times a year with a circulation of around 35,000 copies. Under GeraMond the title professionalized its rhythm — six issues a year, every two months — and in 2016 added the Extra special issue, a personality-focused annual that gives the editors space for deep biographical treatment of historically significant military figures.

The magazine has navigated the segment's sensitivities with a consistent editorial line. The epd feature on the war-magazine market drew a careful distinction between the serious military-history titles — Militär & Geschichte, Clausewitz — and the pulp "Landser" tradition of fictionalized front-line adventure booklets, whose most notorious example was discontinued by Bauer Media Group in 2013 after accusations of glorifying war. Militär & Geschichte positions itself firmly on the documentary side of that line: documented history, named historians, sourced images.

Content

The magazine organizes its articles into standing categories: Menschen & Schicksale (people and fates), Kriege & Schlachten (wars and battles), Waffen & Technik (weapons and technology), Verbände & Einheiten (formations and units), and since 2019 Militaria — the collecting world of military artifacts. The chronological center of gravity is the 19th and 20th centuries, the era of industrialized warfare, but the magazine regularly reaches back to antiquity and forward to the modern age.

The forms of presentation are deliberately documentary: historical documents reproduced in facsimile or excerpt, eyewitness reports, maps that reconstruct battles and campaigns, and extensive photographic material. Articles are written by historians and specialist journalists rather than by staff generalists, which gives the magazine its characteristic voice — accessible but sourced, narrative but anchored in the archive. The Extra special issue, published regularly since 2016, extends this approach into the biographical: each edition takes a selected military-historically significant personality and treats the life, the campaigns and the historical judgment in depth.

The 2019 addition of the Militaria category reflects the magazine's readership reality: many readers are collectors, modelers, and amateur historians for whom uniforms, medals, edged weapons and vehicles are not abstractions but objects of study. The magazine serves that interest with the same documentary care it brings to campaigns and biographies.

Coverage & Audience

Militär & Geschichte covers military history across all eras, with its editorial weight on the 19th and 20th centuries and regular excursions into antiquity and the modern period. Its geographic scope is global — the history of warfare is, by nature, a world history — but the readership's center of interest is recognizably German and European: the German military experience, the two world wars, the Cold War confrontation, and the long history of European armies.

The audience is one of the most precisely documented in German special-interest publishing. According to the publisher, 99.3 percent of readers are male; every second reader holds the Abitur or a higher educational qualification; and about 46 percent of readers are between 40 and 59 years old. The average reading time per issue is around four hours — a figure that speaks to the magazine's function as a slow, immersive medium rather than a news skim. The epd survey added the loyalty dimension: more than 93 percent of readers had subscribed since the magazine's founding in 2002. The sold circulation is around 29,000 copies per issue, according to the magazine's media data. The typical reader, in the publisher's portrait, names history as a hobby — this is a magazine for people who read military history the way others follow football: seriously, continuously, and for decades.

Ownership

Militär & Geschichte is published by the GeraMond Verlag GmbH, a Munich specialist publisher within the GeraNova Bruckmann Verlagshaus. GeraNova Bruckmann is one of Germany's significant special-interest publishing houses, with a portfolio built around transport, modeling, military history and popular science. The move of Militär & Geschichte from Pabel-Moewig to GeraMond in 2014 placed the title in a publishing environment where its sibling Clausewitz — six issues a year, around 35,000 copies — covers adjacent territory, and where the infrastructure of specialist publishing (direct marketing, subscriptions, bookshop distribution, special issues) is the core competence rather than an afterthought.

The magazine's website confirms the Munich address: the legal notice for the newsletter names the GeraNova Bruckmann Verlagshaus GmbH, Infanteriestraße 11a, 80797 München. The editor-in-chief is Markus Wunderlich. The corporate structure behind the title is thus a Munich-based special-interest publisher operating within a larger publishing house — a stable, segment-focused ownership that explains the title's longevity in a market where general-interest print has struggled.

Digital Presence

The magazine's official website is militaer-und-geschichte.de, verified live during research. The site presents the magazine's identity — "Wir sind Militär & Geschichte" — and operates the title's newsletter, with the subscription legal notice confirming the GeraNova Bruckmann publishing home in Munich. The digital offering functions as the magazine's subscription and community hub: issue previews, the newsletter, and the e-commerce path to subscriptions and back issues, alongside the Extra special editions.

For a title whose readers spend an average of four hours with each print issue, the digital presence is deliberately complementary rather than substitutive: the print magazine remains the product, and the website and newsletter extend its reach, handle subscriptions, and keep the extraordinarily loyal readership — more than nine in ten of whom have been reading since 2002 — in continuous contact with the editors. In a segment where trust and continuity are the currency, Militär & Geschichte's digital presence is built the same way as its print product: documentary, specialist, and steady.