Berliner Tageblatt
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The Berliner Tageblatt was a newspaper founded by publisher Rudolf Mosse in Berlin and first brought out on January 1, 1872. It first served as an advertising paper but then developed into an influential newspaper.
[edit] History
On January 5, 1919, the office of the newspaper was shortly occupied by revolting soldiers in the German Revolution. By 1920, the Berliner Tageblatt achieved a daily circulation of about 245,000 exemplars.
Under the editor in chief, Theodor Wolff, it became the most influential newspaper of Berlin. The Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung became the most important liberal German newspapers.
From 1918 until April 1920, Kurt Tucholsky was editor in chief of the humoristic supplement, Ulk, that appeared weekly between 1913 and 1933. In the same time, Tucholosky also contributed fifty articles for the Berliner Tageblatt.
In twenty-seven years as editor in chief, Wolff could bring the elite of German journalism to the Berliner Tageblatt. Contributors included Ernst Feder, Rudolf Olden, Josef Schwab, Max Jordan, Maximilian Müller-Jabusch, Arthur Norden, Felix Pinner, and Fred Hildenbrandt.
Chief of the cultur section was Alfred Kerr. Regular contributors there included Alfred Polgar, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Otto Flake, and Frank Thiess. The novel Schloss Gripsholm by Tucholsky, was preprinted in 1931.
On March 3, 1933, after the Reichstag fire, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, the publisher, dismissed editor in chief Theodor Wolff, who had flown to Tyrol, because of his criticism of the government and his Jewish ancestry.
After 1933, the newspaper was put under control of the government (Gleichschaltung), but in September 1933, special permission was granted by Goebbels to release the paper from any obligation to reprint National Socialist Propaganda, so as to portray an international image of a free German press. By this assurance, on 1st April 1934, their respected foreign correspondent, Paul Scheffer [the first foreign journalist to be refused a re-entry permit by the Soviets in 1929 for his negative reporting of the Five-Year Plan and prophesy of an impending famine in Ukraine] became editor. For almost two years, Scheffer surroundeded himself by independently minded university graduates, such as Margaret Boveri, who wrote in 1960, that Scheffer; "was hated from the beginning by leading people of the Propaganda Ministry, and it was only because of his excellent foreign connections that he was not relieved of his position in the early years of the regime." [Source: Henry Regnery, "At the Eye of the Storm", Modern Age, 1976, citing Boveri, "Wir lugen alle", Olten and Freiburg.]
On 31st December 1936, Scheffer's position became untenable and resigned. The paper was finally closed by the Nazi authorities on January 31, 1939.
[edit] Circulation
- 1917: 245,000 exemplars.
- 03.1919: on weekdays: 160,000-170,000, Sundays 300,000 exemplars
- 1920: on weekdays: 245,000, Sundays 300,000 exemplars
- 1923: Sundays about 250,000 exemplars
- 04.1928: 150,000 exemplars
- 1929: on weekdays 137,000, thereof city: 83,000, Sundays: 250,000 exemplars
- 1930-1931: on weekdays 121,000, (thereof city: 77,000), Sundays 208,000, thereof city: 113,000 exemplars)
- 04.1931: 140,000 exemplars
- 1933: 130,000 – 240,000 exemplars
