BERLIN — The first German edition of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo arrived on newsstands Thursday, nearly two years after an attack on the publication’s headquarters in Paris killed top editors and contributors. The edition is a response to significant German interest in Charlie Hebdo after the attack, editors said this week.
“It’s an experiment,” Gerard Biard, Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, said Wednesday.
“It’s an answer to this particular interest, which is not only about what happened and freedom of expression but also about ideas.”
Biard said the paper had been the subject of numerous exhibitions, awards and news coverage in Germany since the attack on Jan. 7, 2015, in which two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, stormed the offices in Paris with assault rifles, leaving 12 dead.
With an initial print run of 200,000, the new edition will be available across Germany every Thursday. It will consist mostly of translated material from the French version, but with some original content for its German readers.
The first cover depicts a worn-out-looking Chancellor Angela Merkel lying on a hydraulic lift, with a caption saying that the German carmaker Volkswagen “stands behind Merkel” and that “with a new exhaust pipe, she’ll be good to go for another four years.”
The newspaper’s “Survivors” edition, published a week after the attack on its offices and once again depicting the Prophet Muhammad, sold 70,000 copies in Germany, editors said.