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overview
This page considers the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(aka FAZ) and its precedecessor the Frankfurter Zeitung,
publications broadly equivalent to the New York Times.
This page covers -
 the
Frankfurter Zeitung
The Frankfurter Zeitung traced its origins to Leopold
Sonnemann's establishment in 1856 of the Frankfurter
Geschäftsberichte, a finance and investment
market newsletter. Sonnemann had expanded from textile
production (with a family mill at Höchberg) into
banking at Frankfurt, then the financial centre of what
was about to become the german state. With AB Rosenthal
he developed the Geschäftsberichte as the
higher-circulation Frankfurter Handelszeitung.
In 1859 that title became the Frankfurter Zeitung
and over the next three decades gained a reputation as
Germany's preeminent business paper, marked by the quality
of its content and its liberal democratic values. Unfortunately
esteem was not reflected in major profitability or circulation:
after 1920 for example subscriptions failed to reach the
100,000 mark.
Sonnemann formed the Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei
in 1860 to hold printing and other publishing interests
and during 1867 became the Zeitung's sole proprietor
and editor. He served in the Reichstag for several years,
gaining attention as a critic of Bismark. (Annexation
of Alsace-Lorraine after 1872 was for example denounced
as "simply robbery").
in
Weimar and the Third Reich
From 1900 onwards it attracted attention as a leading
outlet for feuilletons from authors such as Thomas Mann,
Joseph Roth, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno and Walter
Benjamin and for incisive economic, cultural and plitical
analysis. Joseph Roth commented in 1926 to editor Benno
Reifenberg that
It's
not possible to write feuilletons with your left hand,
and one shouldn't allow oneself to write them on the
side. That's a serious slight to the whole form. The
feuilleton is as important as politics are to the newspaper,
and to the reader it's vastly more important. The modern
newspaper is formed by everything but politics. The
modern newspaper needs reporters more than it needs
editorial writers. I'm not a garnish, not a dessert,
I'm the main course … What people pick up the
newspaper for is me. Not the parliamentary report. Not
the lead article. Not the foreign news. And yet, in
the editorial offices, they go around thinking of Roth
as a sort of eccentric chatterbox that they can just
about afford as they're such a great newspaper. They
are so mistaken. I don't write "witty columns".
I paint the portrait of the age. That's what great newspapers
are there for. I'm not a reporter, I'm a journalist;
I'm not an editorial writer, I'm a poet.
With
a narrow economic base - in contrast to the range of mass-market
publications underpinning ongoing expansion at Ullstein
- the Zeitung was hit hard by the hyperinflation
of the early 1920s and problems from 1927. In 1929 chemical
industry giant IG Farben under Carl Bosch acquired 35%
of its shares, with Farben taking a further 14.5% in 1930
and relieving the Simon-Sonnemann family of the remaining
shares in 1934. Leading firms in the chemical industry
had funded Die Zeit in 1923 as a vehicle for
liberal democrat Gustav Stresemann; Farben bought 75%
of the Frankfurter Nachtrichten in 1930.
In contrast to immediate takeover of the Ullstein
and Mosse groups, overt
government 'coordination' of the Zeitung was
gradual - apparently because Goebbels regarded the paper
as an international showpiece and because its elite readership
was deemed of lesser concern than the mass readership
of the other group. In 1939 the Nazi Party's Eher
Verlag publishing house acquired the Zeitung's capital
(and that of associated enterprises), with Max Amann presenting
the company to Hitler as "a birthday present".
The Zeitung was closed in 1943. Historian Modris
Eksteins tartly but accutely commented in 1971 that
Goebbels
had once said that he could think of no greater pleasure
than 'to see the gentlemen in the Eschenheime Gasse
[ie at the FZ] dancing to my ture'. In 1933
they began to dance and danced for ten years - until
the FZ ceased publication in 1943. Occasionally,
for a split moment, they grimaced or made disrespectful
signs behind their backs, but in the audience very few
noticed, for attention was focused on the highly accurate
dance steps.
the
FAZ
Licensing restrictions, concerns about the market
and unavailiability of requisites such as newsprint meant
that the title was not revived immediately after Germany's
surrender. Erich Dombrowski and Zeitung journalists,
with French support, launched the Mainzer Allgemeine
Zeitung in Mainz at the end of 1946.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) was
launched in November 1949 under the leadership of Erich
Welter. He had served as editor-in-chief of the Vossisches
Zeitung in Berlin from 1932 to 1934 and was on the
FZ editorial staff from 1935 to 1943. In 1946 he launched
the Wirtschaftszeitung in Stuttgart.
The FAZ is now controlled by the FAZIT Stiftung,
a foundation that is broadly comparable to the Guardian
Media Group's Scott Trust in its values of editorial independence
and and objectives regarding liberal and constitutional
civil rights.
The FAZ has a national distribution, with a daily circulation
as of August 2004 of around 407,000 copies in Germany
and 40,000 copies outside the country (for an overall
readership of its German and English editions of around
one million people).
The FAZ is the flagship of a group of supplements, new
media operations and book publishing interests. Those
holdings are highlighted in the following page of this
profile. They include major book publisher DVA and a controlling
stake in Munich-based publisher Prestel.
studies
There has been no major English-language study of the
Frankfurter Zeitung or Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung. A short profile of the admirable Sonnemann
appears in The Pity Of It All (New York: Metropolitan
2003) by Amos Elon, usefully read in conjunction with
Peter Gay's superb Freud, Jews & other Germans
(New York: Oxford Uni Press).
Context for the period from 1900 to 1933 is provided by
Modris Eksteins' The Limits of Reason: The German
Democratic Press and the Collapse of Weimar Democracy
(Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1975), Kurt Koszyk's Deutsche
Press 1914-1945 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag 1972),
'The Frankfurter Zeitung: Mirror of Weimar Democracy'
by Modris Eksteins in Journal of Contemporary History
(Vol 6 No 4) 1971 and Peter de Mendelssohn's Zeitungsstadt
Berlin: Menschen und Mächte in der Geschichte der
Deutschen Presse (Berlin: Ullstein 1959). For the
Third Reich see Oron Hale's The Captive Press in the
Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1964)
and other works highlighted here.
For IG Farben see in particular Industry & Ideology:
IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
Press 1987) by Peter Hayes and Helmuth Tammen's IG
Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (1925- 1933) - Ein
Chemiekonzern in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: 1978).
Henry Ashby Turner's German Big Business & the
Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1985)
offers cautions regarding claims about Hugenberg's influence.
Germanists can turn to Günther Gillessen's Auf
verlorenem Posten - Die Frankfurter Zeitung im Dritten
Reich (Munich: Siedler 1986), Wolfgang Schivelbusch's
Intellektuellendämmerung: Zur Lage der Frankfurter
Intelligenz in den zwanziger Jahren (Frankfurt am
Main 1983), Werner Wirthle's Frankfurter Zeitung und
Frankfurter Societätsdruckerei GmbH. Die wirtschaftlichen
Verhältnisse 1927-1939 (Frankfurt aM: Frankfurter
Societätsverlag 1977), Almut Todorow's 'Die "Frankfurter
Zeitung" als intellektuelles Forum der Weimarer Republik'
in Les intellectuelles et l'état sous la république
de Weimar (Paris 1993) edited by Manfred Gangl &
Hélène Roussel and Helga Hummerich's Wahrheit
zwischen den Zeilen: Erinnerungen an Benno Reifenberg
und die Frankfurter Zeitung (Freiburg 1984).
Albert Oeser Und Die Frankfurter Zeitung (1979) is
an account by Erich Welter, first editor of the FAZ. A
perspective on continuities before and after 1945 is provided
by Die Herren Journalisten: Die Elite der deutschen
Presse nach 1945 (Munich: Beck 2002) by Lutz Hachmeister
& Friedemann Siering.
Writing by Zeitung authors such as Kracauer,
Adorno and Benjamin is available in various collections.
For Joseph Roth see in particular his Report From
a Parisian Paradise: Essays From France, 1925-1939
(New York: Norton 2003) and What I Saw: Reports from
Berlin, 1920-33 (London: Granta 2001).
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holdings)
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