Allgemeine Zeitung
Allgemeine Zeitung ('General Newspaper').
FULL, SORT-BY NAME: Allgemeine Zeitung
ALTERNATIVE NAME/S: None.
DATE INVENTED/BEGAN: 9th September 1798.
PLACE INVENTED/BEGAN: Tubingen, Germany.
DATE ENDED:
PLACE ENDED:
DISCIPLINE: Journalism.
FIELD: Publishing.
SHORT DESCRIPTION/ASSESSMENT: Greatest German newspaper of the 19th century, founded in Tübingen in 1798 by Johann Friedrich Cotta*.
LANGUAGE/S: German.
DETAILS/DESCRIPTION:
The Allgemeine Zeitung was the brainchild of the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta, 1764-1832, who in 1787 took over the family book publishing business, which had been established in 1640 in Tubingen, Germany.
Cotta, a businessman of great talent and ambition, saw the potential for a venture in which great authors would be properly paid and published, and a market would be created for well-presented, important works. Through his close personal relationship with Schiller*, Cotta achieved his aims remarkably quickly and he soon had an impressive array of works by German Romantic writers.
The idea for the Allgemeine Zeitung originated in the summer of 1792, when Cotta decided to spend some time in Paris to see the effects of the French Revolution at first hand.
The Allgemeine Zeitung gathered and published its own news. In this respect it outstripped even its great rival, the Hamburg 'Correspondent'; as a thinking newspaper with European range.
Contributions to the Allgemeine Zeitung came from the most important people in Germany and from significant Germans abroad.
Soon, every serious thinker took care to appear in the well-presented and well-supported publication. It also became important for every publicist to have his views expressed there.
Like its less prosperous cousins, Cotta's newspaper included a lot of second-hand material, but private correspondence was the paper's hallmark. The appearance of private reports alongside the public documents and official explanations enhanced the individual reader’s ability to draw his own conclusions about events. It quickly became one of the most influential periodicals in central Europe.
Although with a circulation of only 2,000 it sold fewer copies than some of its competitors, the paper was aimed at the elite power-brokers. Its influence extended wherever those people were found, "from England to Sicily and from Paris to Moscow . . . and even Turkey" (as Cotta would later recall in 1828).
The Allgemeine Zeitung survived its first few difficult years partly on the strength of Cotta's connection with Archduke Charles, whose aide, Matthias von Fassbender kept the newspaper informed about the war with France.
Alongside these reports, however, were others with different views. Articles appeared by political activists in the Rhineland, Alsace, Baden and Switzerland, who continued saw the French advance into Germany as an opportunity for political liberalization.
Wurttemberg's Duke Frederick tolerated the paper because it stayed clear of his duchy's domestic problems, but in October 1803, under Napoleon, the new master of Germany, Frederick ordered Cotta's newspaper to close. Cotta avoided the edict by immediately moving his presses to Ulm in Bavaria. More censorship difficulties caused the editorial office of the newspaper to be transferred again in 1810 to Augsburg, and in 1882 to Munich.
The newspaper continued to be successful throughout the 19th century, although it had other detractors who considered its impartiality and political detachment as amoral and damaging to the German public. At one time, Marx* complained that the paper had become one in which "freedom is on the one hand too young, on the other too old, but never the order of the day".
On the opposite side of the political divide, Heinrich von Tretischke said that it was 'so chameleon-like that it could not fail to exercise a profoundly disastrous influence upon the political culture of the nation, which, in its nebulous embitterment and obscure yearning, above all needed relentlessly straightforward instruction. It nourished in its readers that erudite political impotence by which cultured Germans were tragically distinguished from neighbouring nations.'
The Allgemeine Zeitung ceased publication in its traditional form in 1912.
OTHER CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Allgemeine Zeitung, influential German newspaper
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Moran, Daniel, 'Towards the Century of Words: Johann Cotta and the Politics of the Public Realm in Germany, 1795-1832', Berkeley & Oxford: University of California Press, 1990.