Henri Nannen; Founded Stern, Germany’s Largest Magazine

Henri Nannen, founder and longtime publisher of Germany’s biggest-selling magazine, Stern, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, a spokesman for the magazine said. He was 82.

One of the country’s most influential journalists and a noted art collector, Nannen launched the weekly illustrated Stern amid the rubble of postwar Germany in 1948. Its colorful focus on issues that affected ordinary people helped it become the magazine with the largest circulation in Europe at one point.

Whether publishing articles critical of the government or the church, Stern tapped the mood of the nation and often triggered national discussions. It also sometimes drew the ire of the occupying Western Allies in Germany, which on several occasions confiscated issues of the magazine in the 1940s and ‘50s.

The magazine’s reputation was badly tarnished in 1983, three years after Nannen retired as editor in chief, when it published what turned out to be the bogus “Hitler Diaries.”

Nannen, who was a member of the magazine’s board of directors at the time, accepted blame for the fiasco even though he was no longer running the magazine.

“I will always have to live with the fact that I failed here politically and journalistically,” Nannen said.