From the Origins of Broadcasting to the Post-war Period (1920–45)

Abstract

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the newspaper per se originated from Germany, making the country the ‘birthplace of European intellectual journalism’ (Humphreys 1994: 13). Still, German Frühliberalismus, the early local development of liberalism, did not set in before the 1820s and, thus, far later than in England (Langewiesche 1988: 12; Sheehan, 1978: 11). The movement was fragmented and lacked strength in Germany, whose society remained closed and driven by authoritarianism. The development of the press towards a mass medium was accompanied by strict censorship and control, exerted by the ancien régime of state and church. In the feudal-absolutist state the sovereign would grant or withdraw at will the privilege to publish a newspaper in his territory. This authoritarianism, paired with the fragmented structure of the German Empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, determined that the country increasingly lagged behind commercially driven developments in the Anglo-Saxon world, where processes of industrialization started much earlier. In Britain, Scandinavia and, since 1881, also in France, the triumph of bourgeois liberalism accompanied freedom of the press. In 1874 in Bismarckian Germany, although pre-publication censorship was abolished the regime remained highly conservative (Humphreys 1996: 20–1).