[5][3] The Nebelspalter — the title translates as "Fog-cleaver" — had its heyday in the 1930s, before and during the Second World War, when it denounced the acts of violence and ideology of the Nazis and of their followers in Switzerland, the Frontists.

The Nebelspalter had developed into a "spearhead of intellectual defense" against National Socialism, and it took a similar stand against communism in the Cold War until the 1960s.

The popularity of the "Nebi", as it was called, was to a large extent due to the then editor-in-chief Carl Böckli (born September 23, 1889, died 4 December 1970), who was talented both as an illustrator and writer in the tradition of Wilhelm Busch.

For decades, the Nebelspalter was Switzerland's leading satirical medium and talent factory, associated with the biographies of such well known artists as René Gilsi, Jakob Nef, Fritz Behrendt, Nico Cadsky, and Horst Haitzinger, and of satirists such as César Keiser, Franz Hohler, Lorenz Keiser, Peter Root and Linard Bardill.

In the 1990s, the radical realignment of the Nebelspalter under editor-in-chief Ivan Raschle following the style of the Frankfurt Titanic magazine failed.

With a newly appointed editorial board under Marco Ratschiller the title underwent a face-lift leading toward an unpretentious journalistic style, and managed to win over well-known contemporary Swiss authors and satirists like Andreas Thiel, Simon Enzler, Pedro Lenz and Gion Mathias Cavelty.