The press in Weimar Berlin: not only tabloids

Vossische Zeitung (1918) and Volks-Zeitung (1930)

Already before 1914, three publishing houses had established themselves firmly in the Berlin market: Mosse and Ullstein, on the liberal side, and Scherl, owned by the industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, extremely conservative.

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Their flagship papers combined vast advertisement sections, low sale prices, and a huge circulation. By 1914 these three companies had developed into Germany’s biggest publishing empires, covering a great range of printable products. Once it was possible to print photos of great quality, weekly illustrated magazines had become hugely popular and were an important source of advertisement income; Scherl’s Die Woche and Ullstein’s Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) sold all over the country. Their dailies, however, lacked a similar nation-wide circulation. Although Mosse’s Berliner Tageblatt, Ullstein’s Berliner Morgenpost, and Scherl’s Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger had the highest circulation of all German newspapers, sales centred on Berlin. Dependent on local advertisements and with a strong emphasis on local news coverage, the newspapers were targeted at Berliners and held little interest to people outside Berlin, who read almost exclusively small local papers.

The war and its aftermath accelerated the introduction of modern features into the German media. Tabloids were one example.Traditionally, sales of newspapers had exclusively relied on subscriptions and home delivery. Tabloids, however, were primarily distributed through street sales. The first street-selling daily paper, Ullstein’s BZ am Mittag, had already been successfully launched in 1904. Other Berlin publishers soon realized the advertisement value of selling a limited number of their subscription dailies through their own street vendors, but despite the unusually great success of BZ am Mittag they shied back from publishing a proper street-sales (tabloid) paper themselves. The main reason for this reluctance was the commercial challenge of this particular form of retailing. Sales figures could vary wildly and, without a firm subscription basis, a tabloid paper had to acquire its readership every day anew, and thus relied heavily on attractive headlines and a certain amount of sensationalism. Not surprisingly, this sensationalism encountered the supercilious disdain of many bourgeois contemporaries.

The outbreak of war in 1914 changed the situation dramatically. Readers did not want to have to wait to find out about the latest developments. They developed an insatiable demand for the latest ‘news’, and publishers accommodated this demand with a multitude of high-circulation special editions sold exclusively on the street. Bold headlines, pictures, boxes, and bars changed the layout even of traditional subscription newspapers. War did not just result in a politicization of sensations, it also sensationalized politics. Politicians, who had previously deplored the profit-orientation of allegedly non-political, sensation-mongering newspapers, slowly began to change their views. Even Social Democrats recognized the need for a certain amount of sensationalism to sell politics. As Otto Braun, later to become the first Social Democratic prime minister of Prussia, pointed out at the 1917 party conference:

We like talking among ourselves condescendingly of the need for sensation of the great masses. But let us be honest: every human being has the need for a bit of sensation. The more eventful the time, the more this need becomes apparent, and the daily press which completely ignores this human weakness would soon appear without a reading public, because nobody goes to the newsvendor to buy sleeping pills.

A Boy of Flanders - Film from 1924

After the war, the number of Berlin tabloids multiplied: in 1919, some editors of the 8-Uhr-Abendblatt decided to start up another tabloid, to compete with Ullstein’s BZ am Mittag, called Neue Berliner Zeitung which soon became popular under its trading name Das 12-Uhr-Blatt. The newly founded Communist paper, Die Rote Fahne, found its tabloid equivalent in Die Welt am Abend, a socialist evening paper founded in 1922, which was bought up by Willi Münzenberg in 1925 and turned into Berlin’s most popular Communist newspaper. In 1922, Hugenberg too established an evening tabloid edition, Die Nachtausgabe, of his political broadsheet, Tag. These tabloids inundated Berlin’s streets and resulted in a cut-throat competition for publication times.

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