German press

“ During the last fifty years little has been done to liberate the newspaper, to give it free play, to unmuzzle it. It is the misfortune of the German Press that the special laws for the regulation of newspapers and serial publications have been evolved from a system of legislation which was devised in times of great political unrest and agitation. ... Liberty of the Press has been one of the leading political watchwords of the reform party during the last three-quarters of a century. ”

“ The leading papers of the German press, though strong in correspondence and in discussion of affairs, are far less comprehensive in their news than the American or the English. The French journals, we are accustomed to say, are not newspapers at all. ”

“ Before all, one would think that the press must diffuse gratitude and contentment on all sides, for I venture to say that it is the press which, to a particular extent, owes me thanks. Noble Lords and faithful States, I require your German hearts to grant me those thanks. While recognizing the honorable endeavor to elevate the press by a noble and conscientious spirit, it is yet unquestionable that in a portion of it a dark spirit of destruction prevails, a spirit that entices to revolution, and that deals in the most audacious falsehood, disgraceful to German fidelity and Prussian honor. ”

“ The German press had never occupied a high position. All discussion of State matters being now prohibited, it had to confine itself, as regarded politics, to the simple chronicling of facts, and to fill its columns with court news, accounts of storms and floods, the birth of marvellous monsters in the animal, and the appearance of new stars in the theatrical, world.
The cultivated classes sought a kind of compensation for their exclusion from politics in a frantically exaggerated interest in the theatre. ”

“ The German newspapers are very numerous; their circulation is large; they are written for the most part with much ability; their treatment of social and political questions is often marked by a breadth of view and a soundness of logic too frequently wanting in many of their English contemporaries. Their influence upon the minds of their readers is also greater than that wielded by the majority of our newspapers printed in the English language. We have heard this fact attributed to the superior honesty with which the German press is conducted ”

“ While the utterances of the Emperor's Government leave nothing to desire, there is danger of them being wiped out by the eruption of malevolent antipathy of the German press, which to Americans of German birth is not only painful but inexplicable. ”

“ Probably three quarters of the men who afterward became prominent in the party owed their rise and, to a great extent, their general education to their service on the editorial staffs of their party's press. By intelligent reports and special articles on news of interest to all members of the Internationale, whether German, French, English, or of what nationality they might be, this press made itself indispensable to the leaders of that movement all over the world, and contributed greatly to influencing the ideas of the Socialists of other lands. ”

“ For thirty years the press of Germany has seldom missed an opportunity to express its contempt for Americans. Any American who has ever lived in Germany or who has read German newspapers during the last thirty years is aware of the tone of the German press concerning America and Americans. ”

“ If the German Press, however, can be used occasionally for reporting things that people did not say, it can be used with equal facility for suppressing important statements actually made. For example, a Reuter telegram from Copenhagen on September 7th quoted a statement taken from the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, and published at Copenhagen by the German semi-official news agency. ”

“ Competition is keen, and if one paper does not dig up and publish the facts, a rival is likely to do so. The German Press was gaining a limited degree of freedom before the war, but that has been wiped away. As in other belligerent countries news of a military nature must quite properly pass the censor. But in Germany, unlike Great Britain, for example, all other topics must be written in a manner to please the Government, or trouble ensues for the writer and his paper. ”

“ In the field of foreign politics the German press is less well-informed, less instructive, and consequently irritating. The poverty of material resources makes such writing as that of Sir Valentine Chirrol, and in former days that of Mr. G. W. Smalley, beyond the reach of the German journalist, and their press is painfully narrow, frequently unfair, and often purposely insulting to foreign countries. They are not only anti- English, but anti-French, anti-American, and at times bitter. If the American people read the German newspapers there would be little love lost between us. ”

“ Any attempt on the part of our Government to dictate the policy of any newspaper would be hotly resented, and would be doomed to certain failure. Americans do not believe in the German doctrine that the press must be "so far controlled as is requisite for the welfare of the community," and hold that absolute freedom of speech is essential to true liberty. There is no censorship of the American press. You have a censorship which all the outside world knows has been wonderfully effective in keeping some important facts from the knowledge of the German people. ”

“ I once asked a well-known English journalist who is of German birth, why one of our newspaper kings did not set up a huge, gossipy, frivolous paper in Berlin, and it was explained to me that it would be impossible, because the editor and his staff would probably find themselves in prison in a week. What we understand by Freedom of the Press does not exist there. ”

“ Bring personal influence to bear as far as possible on the editors who have been intimidated by the Stock Exchange, representing to them that if the German press takes up a timid and hesitating attitude in presence of the rhodomontades of the French, the latter will become more insolent and put forward intolerable demands in other questions affecting Germany still more closely. ”

“ Our Press is constantly bought and sold, in gross and detail, by financiers, advertisers, political parties, and the like. Germany came into the market rather noisily, and great papers do to a large extent live in glass houses; but her efforts have been sufficient to exercise the minds of great numbers of men with the problem of what might have happened in the way of national confusion if the German attack had been more subtly conceived.... ”

“ Similarly in the French Revolution, modern journalism, till then unimportant and sporadic, received its first great development, and began seriously to displace alike the preacher, the pamphlet, and the broadside. The flood of theological [84] disquisitions, satires, dialogues, sermons, which now poured from every press in Germany, overflowed into all classes of society. ”

“ Leading French and English editors were able with much difficulty to secure copies of some German papers, and occasionally the large press associations and some of the leading newspapers in America were permitted to see a few ancient copies, but nowhere could they be had by the private citizen, nor even read with safety in public places by those entitled to have them. ”

“ The class struggle of the system era; the Leadership Principle and the authoritarian state; the party and interest politics of the system era; the Jewish problem; the conspiracy of world-Jewry; the Bolshevistic danger; the plutocratic democracy abroad; the race problem generally; the church; the economic misery abroad; the foreign policy; the living space (Lebensraum) .”
This description of Fritzsche establishes clearly and in his own words that the German Press Division was the instrument for subordinating the entire German press to the political aims of the government. ”

“ As we have noted elsewhere, just as the citizens of Berlin, as one sees them in the streets and in public places, give one the impression that they are not house-trained, so many of the pens and pencils which serve the German press, leave one with the feeling that their possessors would not know how to behave in a cultivated and well-regulated household. ”

“ I was not in Germany very long until I was impressed by the remarkable control the Government had on public opinion by censorship of the press. People believe, without exception, everything they read in the newspapers. And I soon discovered that the censor was so accustomed to dealing with German editors that he applied the same standards to the foreign correspondents. A reporter could telegraph not what he observed and heard, but what the censors desired American readers to hear and know about Germany. ”

“ The creation of the new empire has not improved German journalism. The “Press-Bureau” has enlarged the circle of its activity, while the government has invented other means not less effective for controlling the newspapers. “We care not for public opinion,” said a high official in Berlin some months ago; “for the entire press belongs to us.” Prussia has German public opinion, in so far as it is allowed to find expression, in her keeping. After the war with Austria the annual secret fund of the “Press-Bureau” was increased to 70,000 thalers ”

“ I am speaking to you as if to a member of the profession—like one augur to another. And when we come to speak of your own profession, you turn out to be a simpleton. How can you speak of an independent press, when under the pressure of the high finance of the Russian and German governments?"
"You will pardon me. I honor your uprightness equally with that of the greatest of my profession. But I must stop at that. Newspapers are still guided by morality. ”

“ No one of these journals pretends to such power or such influence as certain great dailies in America and in England. They have not the means at their command to buy much cable or telegraphic news, and lacking a press tariff for telegrams, they are the more hampered. The German temperament, and the civil-service and political close-corporation methods, make it difficult for the journalist to go far, either socially or politically. The German has been trained in a severe school to seek knowledge, not to look for news, and he does not make the same demands, therefore, upon his newspaper. ”

“ Yet the heart of this people can always be won for great and noble aims, even though such aims can only be attended by danger. We must not be misled in this respect by the Press, which often represents a most one-sided, self-interested view, and sometimes follows international or even Anti-German lines rather than national. The soul of our nation is not reflected in that part of the Press with its continual dwelling on the necessity of upholding peace, and its denunciation of any bold and comprehensive political measure as a policy of recklessness. ”

“ Such persons must receive the necessary information about current events, questions to be considered and duties to be performed, from journals published in the language they understand, or they will not have it at all. The suppression of the German-American press would, therefore, be equivalent to the cultivation of political ignorance among a large and highly estimable class of citizens.
It is argued that the existence of the German newspaper is apt to render the German immigrant less sensible of the necessity of learning English. ”

“ The German Socialists have always had a keen appreciation of the influence of the press. No other country has such an extensive, well-edited and influential array of Socialist newspapers and periodicals as Germany, and in no other country are the Socialists so carefully disciplined into taking their political views from their party organs. As the parent party, the Majority Socialists already had their press. The Independents had no organ of any importance in Berlin, and Liebknecht's Spartacans had none at all. ”

“ Three days later, by Royal proclamation, a series of ordinances was published creating very stringent regulations for the control of the Press; they gave the police the right of forbidding a newspaper to appear for no other reason except disapproval of its general tendency. It was a power more extreme than in the worst days of the Carlsbad decrees had ever been claimed by any German Government. ”

“ Most newspaper correspondents write for their bread and cheese, most newspapers look to their incomes, and an experienced reader may easily see, by our newspapers and others, whether they have received, or speedily anticipate, or wish by threatening pantomime to force, a subsidy from Austria.
I think we should produce an admirable revulsion in public opinion if we were to sound the chords of independent Prussian policy in the press, in opposition to the exaggerations of our German allies. Perhaps things may happen at Frankfurt which may give us full reason to do so. ”

“ Whether Bismarck's attitude towards the press was cause or result is both uncertain and immaterial, but Bismarck himself spoke in contemptuous terms of the press, and foreign and German writers on the press of Germany during his time refer to the low social position of editors and press correspondents,—"no foreign correspondent can be received at the German court;" "editors are paid small salaries and are not in the highest social circles;" "journalists are a pack of fellows too lazy to work and too illiterate to be schoolmasters of children;" ”