The Right had also its tabloids

Which shouldn't come as a surprise: British evening papers (tabloids) are mostly conservative, as is Bild-Zeitung in today's Germany. Yet, left-wing tabloids are not unheard of, in countries like Portugal or Chile.

Earlier posts have dealt with the first Berlin tabloid, the emblematic BZ am Mittag, and with its communist counterpart : Welt am Abend, in the Willi Münzenberg publishing sphere, something as unique as a communist paper which was not read exclusively by party-members, a paper that did not content itself with political propaganda but which also aimed at giving information and also at entertaining, something considered « bourgeois » by traditionalist marxists.

That kind of tabloids, also known as « Boulevard papers », encountered contemptuous disdain among the political class. In particular Hugenberg (a business tycoon on the extreme-right, who would eventually become, for some time, minister in Hitler’s first government) struggled with fellow DNVP Protestant puritans (DNVP was the German National Party, conservative, nationalist and antisemitic) who considered his Nachtausgabe an immoral enterprise aimed at titillating the masses. But Hugenberg was unwilling to leave this field to Ullstein and Mosse (the other two big publishing houses, more democratic, as opposed to Hugenberg’s, openly hostile to the republican system).

Already in 1919, the right-wing star columnist Adolf Stein had pointed out to Hugenberg that ‘through our nationalist newspapers we do not reach the masses who read social democratic or democratic papers’. Nachtausgabe, founded in 1922, was Hugenberg’s attempt at wooing a metropolitan, predominantly working-class readership. This was not simply a commercial move, but one driven by political motives, as Hugenberg defended himself in front of his nationalist colleagues. In all big cities of the world, he explained, a tabloid relied on a particular layout and composition: ‘Otherwise these big city folk simply don’t buy it. They buy it because of the sensation which it carries—and they swallow the politics which is contained in between.’

Party newspapers generally were on the decline, one journalist declared in 1928: The working population of Berlin is reading the lively and well-edited papers whether they are produced by the publishing houses Mosse, Ullstein, Hugenberg or Münzenberg; they don’t generally bother about the party tendency . . . They want a quick and precise news service, want pictures and demand a certain tickle. It does not want to be lectured, but to be informed, and to be slightly sensationalized. . . ’

The tabloids we have seen this far belonged to the extreme-right, the extreme-left and the center. But what about the socialdemocrats, one of the biggest parties in the Republic ? Their party-organ was called Vorwärts, a « serious » newspaper. Shortly before the Reichstag elections in 1928, the SPD attempted to jump on the tabloid-bandwagon and turned the evening edition of Vorwärts into a tabloid-style paper, called Der Abend. It was a fiasco. What had happened with the Weimar Republic if the SPD had had a mass-media genius as Münzenberg in their service, as the Communists had ? Could German democracy have survived ?

As we have seen, Ullstein, one of the « democratic » publishing houses (the other one being Mosse), had at an earlier stage launched BZ am Mittag. But in 1929, they started a second tabloid : Tempo. Why ? As a reply to Mosse’s acquisition of the 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, aimed to compete with the other two late-afternoon tabloids, Münzenberg’s Welt am Abend and Hugenberg’s Nachtausgabe. Remember : BZ am Mittag appeared at 1 p.m. Tempo was the most radical proponent of American-style tabloid journalism, with an emphasis on the latest news, up to three revised editions in one afternoon, and an abundance of sensations and catastrophes outdoing everything Berlin had read so far. During the first months of its existence, Tempo lacked almost any

political coverage, and soon became the epitome of the Americanization of the press, decried by conservatives as ‘asphalt flower’ and ‘Jewish flurry’.

In contrast to other Ullstein publications, Tempo was not an instant success. Within some months, however, its circulation had surpassed 140,000. There is good reason to believe it was because of Tempo’s role in the course of the so-called Sklarek scandal in October-November 1929, an affair involving several high-ranking local government officials, including Berlin’s SPD-mayor Gustav Böss. Tempo established itself as one of the most vociferous prosecutors, and attracted a lot of attention by its sensationalist exposure of local corruption. Contrary to Ullstein’s long tradition of supporting the democratic cause, the Tempo now joined Hugenberg’s Nachtausgabe and Münzenberg’s communist Welt am Abend in attacking Berlin’s political leadership. Although the emphasis lay on sensationalist revelations and was not driven by an anti-democratic world view, effectively Tempo contributed to the growing number of voices denigrating the democratic system. Whether this was a conscious business decision is difficult to establish. But it is a fact that from 1925 anti-democratic tabloids were benefiting from better growth rates than were those supporting the parliamentary system. Unlike the political papers, where Ullstein’s Vossische Zeitung was outperforming Hugenberg’s Tag, democratic tabloids like Ullstein’s BZ am Mittag, Mosse’s 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, or the 12-Uhr-Blatt were struggling to keep up the circulation they had reached in the early 1920s, and never came close to the growth displayed by Hugenberg’s Nachtausgabe or Münzenberg’s Welt am Abend after 1925.

Aa readers’ survey of 1924 shows that a paper was not just bought for its political conviction, shared by the reader, but for the entertainment it provided. Also, a lot of circulation growth was clearly driven by non-political factors: part of the Nachtausgabe’s increase in circulation was the result of well-advertised prize draws in 1928 and 1929, the latter with a mass-participation of some 316,000 Berliners. But at the same time neither the 8-Uhr-Abendblatt nor the BZ am Mittag managed to grow decisively, despite being staffed with high- quality journalists and benefiting from the resources of the Mosse and Ullstein publishing houses. They, too, organized their own prize draws and provided a similar amount of illustrations, caricatures, and entertainment, without the success of their ‘anti-system’ opponents.

Among which we shouldn't forget Der Angriff, Goebbels attempt at conquering new supporters for the Nazis.  Founded in July 1927, the paper was not aimed at what Goebbels described as the ‘educated public’: ‘Angriff was meant to be read by the masses, and the masses usually only read that which they understand’, as the coming Minister for Education put it. 

There were many similarities between Angriff and the rest of the Berlin press. Angriff had to offer at least to some extent content which Berlin newspaper readers had come to expect from their papers, like theatre, film, radio and book reviews, a women’s and a youth’s supplement, and the like. In its early years, Angriff could not afford photo reproductions, and the bulk of its images was provided by a caricaturist from Hugenberg’s tabloid, Nachtausgabe, Hans Schweitzer. For almost five years, Hans Schweitzer provided both tabloids with caricatures. Under his Nazi nom-de-plume ‘Mjölnir’, Schweitzer was to become the National Socialists’ most important caricaturist, illustrator, and visual propagandist, hailed after 1933 as ‘the Third Reich’s graphic artist’. Schweitzer’s Angriff ideal types of tall, blond, male Aryans, aggressive and determined, with jutting jaw lines and muscular bodies, were more openly propagandistic and his caricatures generally more anti-Semitic than most of the drawings he produced for Nachtausgabe; still, the fact that Schweitzer published anti-republican caricatures on a daily basis for Hugenberg’s tabloid demonstrates the degree of politicization of the tabloid press in this period.

Information from « Press and politics in the Weimar Republic », by Bernhard Fulda, Oxford University Press, 2009.