Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Marks Holocaust Remembrance Day With Its 100th Brilliant Minds Portrait
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's "The 100th Edition" is a full-page print advertisement published on January 27, 2024 — Holocaust Remembrance Day — featuring 102-year-old Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer seated among the more than 2,700 concrete steles of Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, holding the F.A.Z. newspaper, and photographed by acclaimed director Wim Wenders as the 100th motif in the newspaper's long-running "Brilliant Minds" campaign.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has run its "Brilliant Minds" — formally titled "Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf" — series for more than 25 years. Each execution places a distinguished figure, drawn from political, economic, cultural, or intellectual life, in a setting that speaks to their contribution to public discourse, always with the F.A.Z. in hand. The 100th motif did not simply honour that milestone numerically; it deployed it as a deliberate act of civic communication. By choosing Margot Friedländer, one of the last living witnesses to the Holocaust, and anchoring the image at Germany's most prominent site of collective memory in Berlin, the F.A.Z. transformed a long-running advertising platform into an explicit argument about historical vigilance and resistance to rising intolerance.
The campaign was created by Scholz & Friends, Berlin, operating as a VML company, with Wim Wenders serving as photographer. It was published in Germany and received international attention beyond the German media market. The choice of January 27 — the date the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated in 1945, and now observed internationally as Holocaust Remembrance Day — was not incidental. It situated the advertisement within a specific calendar of civic obligation, making the date itself part of the creative brief. The Clapboard Score for "The 100th Edition" is 79 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's strong conceptual coherence, cultural weight, and execution quality.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung operates in a German newspaper market under sustained structural pressure. According to researchandmarkets.com, German newspaper market revenue was estimated at approximately US$2.6 billion in 2024, with the market declining at a compound annual growth rate of 2.9 percent between 2019 and 2024. According to tatsachen-ueber-deutschland.de, approximately 12.6 million newspapers were sold per publication day in Germany in the second quarter of 2024. These conditions define the competitive environment in which F.A.Z. positions itself against rivals including Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit, both of which also pursue premium readership and intellectual brand identity in the German quality-press segment.
Against this backdrop, the "Brilliant Minds" platform serves a function that goes beyond awareness. It asserts that reading F.A.Z. is an act associated with serious engagement, moral seriousness, and intellectual leadership. According to statista.com, digital newspaper services in Germany reached nearly 48 million people monthly in 2024 — approximately 70 percent of the country's population — while digital circulation increased by 8.4 percent year over year. The platform thus frames print not as a relic but as a deliberate choice made by people of consequence.
The strategic rationale for "The 100th Edition" extends this logic into civic territory. As reported by Little Black Book and contagious.com, the campaign was conceived at a moment of documented concern in Germany about the resurgence of right-wing extremism and public debate about the country's relationship to its own history. Selecting Margot Friedländer — a figure who has devoted the later decades of her life to Holocaust education in Germany — as the 100th subject transforms the campaign's milestone into a form of institutional commitment. The F.A.Z. is not merely celebrating its own longevity; it is using that longevity to make a statement about what kind of society it believes its readers should help build.
Wim Wenders photographed "The 100th Edition." The choice of Wenders — one of Germany's most celebrated filmmakers and a figure with his own significant relationship to questions of German identity, memory, and moral landscape — was itself a creative decision carrying meaning independent of the image he produced. As reported by lbbonline.com, Wenders stated that Margot Friedländer may seem small amid the vast memorial, but what she gives the viewer is immense. That observation describes the compositional logic of the image precisely.
The photograph places Friedländer, then 102 years old, within the field of more than 2,700 concrete steles that constitute Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — a site designed by architect Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005. The steles vary in height, creating a disorienting topography that absorbs and isolates the human figure within it. Friedländer, seated and reading F.A.Z., is both present and surrounded — a living witness inside an architecture of absence. The formal tension between the survivor and the monument is the advertisement's primary visual argument.
The campaign's creative leadership at Scholz & Friends, Berlin included Chief Creative Officer Matthias Spaetgens and Creative Directors Felix John, Mirko Derpmann, and Philipp Weber, with Daniel Klessig serving as Director of Photography, as documented by The One Club. The decision to publish as a full-page print advertisement, as reported by oneclub.org, was deliberate: the physical scale of a broadsheet page gives the steles and Friedländer's figure a spatial relationship that digital formats would compress. Post-production and PR were handled internally by Scholz & Friends, Berlin, preserving the visual integrity established on set, as noted by S-F Family. The formal restraint of the execution — no copy beyond the established campaign line, no graphic intervention — allows the image to carry its entire argument through composition and subject alone.
No single consolidated performance dataset for "The 100th Edition" is publicly available from an independently audited source. The campaign's impact is, however, verifiable through its awards record and documented press coverage. As reported by oneclub.org, the campaign received recognition from One Club for Creativity. As reported by lbbonline.com and contagious.com, the work attracted significant editorial coverage across international advertising and cultural media at the time of its January 27, 2024 publication in Germany, with storyboard18.com and horizont.net also among outlets that documented its reception.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several properties associated with durable advertising effectiveness. The milestone mechanic — the 100th execution of a series running more than 25 years — provided a news hook that justified coverage beyond paid media channels. The selection of Holocaust Remembrance Day as the publication date created a contextual frame that amplified the image's meaning without requiring additional copy. The involvement of Wim Wenders, as reported by frankfurterallgemeine.de, generated cultural attention from audiences who follow his work independent of advertising discourse. And the subject herself, Margot Friedländer, is a figure with her own significant public profile in Germany, whose participation in a commercial context carries the weight of personal testimony.
Together, these structural elements produced an advertisement with an organic distribution profile that extended well beyond its paid print placement. The Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100 reflects that coherence: a campaign in which every decision — subject, photographer, location, format, and date — reinforces a single, clearly stated argument about the duty of remembrance in contemporary Germany.
"The 100th Edition" is a full-page print advertisement published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2024. It marks the 100th motif in F.A.Z.'s long-running "Brilliant Minds" series, featuring 102-year-old Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer photographed by Wim Wenders at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Wim Wenders photographed the campaign. The acclaimed German filmmaker shot Margot Friedländer seated among the concrete steles of Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, with Daniel Klessig serving as Director of Photography, as documented by oneclub.org. The image was published as a full-page print advertisement in Germany.
Scholz & Friends, Berlin — operating as a VML company — created the campaign for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The creative team was led by Chief Creative Officer Matthias Spaetgens and Creative Directors Felix John, Mirko Derpmann, and Philipp Weber, as documented by oneclub.org and lbbonline.com.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — with its more than 2,700 concrete steles — is Germany's most prominent site of collective Holocaust memory. Placing Margot Friedländer, a living survivor, within that architecture created a direct visual tension between personal witness and monumental absence that defined the campaign's core argument, as noted by lbbonline.com.
The "Brilliant Minds" series has run for more than 25 years, according to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's own documentation cited by S-F Wien and Printpower Eu. By 2021, more than 90 motifs had been produced. The 100th motif, published January 27, 2024, marked both a numerical milestone and an expansion of the platform into explicit civic statement-making.
The FAZ "100th Edition" campaign received a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual coherence, the precision of its creative decisions — including subject, photographer, location, format, and publication date — and its structural capacity to generate organic reach beyond its paid print placement in Germany.
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