About Die Furche

Die Furche

Die Furche is a German-language weekly quality newspaper published in Vienna, in the state of Vienna, Austria. Its official website is furche.at. The title translates literally as the furrow, a name chosen with deliberate symbolic meaning when the paper was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Die Furche bills itself as a weekly newspaper for society, politics, culture, religion and business, and it is characterised by a Christian worldview, a liberal-Catholic leaning and a clear commitment to tolerance and openness towards the world. Published by the Styria Media Group, it is one of the longest-lived weekly publications in post-war Austria, having appeared continuously since 1945, and it occupies a distinctive place in Austrian journalism as a paper of ideas, debate and background analysis rather than of breaking news.

Founding and the Idea Behind the Name

Die Furche was founded in 1945 by Friedrich Funder as a cultural-political weekly journal. Its first issue appeared on 1 December 1945, only months after the end of the war, at a moment when Austria was under Allied occupation and its press had to be rebuilt almost from nothing. During the occupation period, which lasted until 1955, the paper carried the name Die österreichische Furche, before reverting to the shorter Die Furche.

The thinking behind the name and the mission was set out in a programme published in September 1945, before the first issue appeared. The weekly explained that it wanted to be a furrow opening up trampled farmland for a promising sowing, after a period of cultural destruction and the devaluation of all valid human values had passed over the homeland. It described its task as being open to the times and directed at current events, not bound to any political party, affirming a healthy democracy and guided by Catholic principles, drawing confidence from the creative forces of a living, heartfelt Christianity. That founding programme, with its combination of democratic commitment, cultural reconstruction and Christian inspiration, has remained the reference point for the paper's identity ever since.

Friedrich Funder and the Reichspost Inheritance

The founder, Friedrich Funder, brought to the new weekly the experience of one of the most prominent Catholic journalists of pre-war Austria. Until 1938 he had led the Reichspost, the Catholic-bourgeois daily newspaper, and Die Furche was initially understood as its successor. The connection gave the young weekly an inheritance, a readership tradition and a clear point of departure in a country whose political camps were re-forming after dictatorship and war.

Funder's own biography helps explain the seriousness of the founding moment. After the Anschluss in March 1938 he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Dachau and Flossenbürg concentration camps, from which he was released in 1939 after interventions by the Holy See. The Reichspost building had been plundered in the meantime and the newspaper had to be discontinued, and Funder was subjected to a ban on writing. Only after 1945 could he found a new weekly, and that paper was Die Furche. Funder himself served as its editor-in-chief from 1945 to 1954, shaping its first decade, before Kurt Skalnik succeeded him from 1954 to 1969.

Editorial Identity and Independence

From the beginning, Die Furche came out of a political milieu with a pronounced closeness to the Catholic Church, yet its church positioning changed fundamentally over the decades. Today the paper understands itself neither as a church newspaper nor as a mouthpiece of the Catholic Church, and it maintains an independent line in relation to official church positions. Religious discourse remains one of its thematic focuses, and that discourse is not confined to Christianity alone.

Austria-Forum describes Die Furche as Austria's only national quality weekly newspaper, offering orientation, analysis and background at a high journalistic level on the essential questions of the time. The paper sees itself as a forum for the broadest possible debates, while also pointedly bringing its own positions into public discussion, in order to contribute to future-oriented thinking, believing and acting. In the words of its own self-description, it does not belong to the compulsory programme of quick information gathering, but to the freestyle discipline of a qualified broadening of horizons. Its longstanding billing as a weekly for society, politics, culture, religion and the economy captures that breadth, spanning parliamentary politics and international affairs, literature and the arts, questions of faith and meaning, education and science, and economic life.

The Friedrich Heer Years and the Battle Over Direction

One of the defining figures of the early Furche was the historian and cultural critic Friedrich Heer. Funder brought Heer into the editorial office on 1 January 1948, and Heer remained an editor of the weekly until 1961, becoming its leading editorial writer. In Die Furche he raised fundamental questions for the young Second Republic about religion and politics, about responsibility for the Nazi past and about Austria's role in Europe, and he became known well beyond Austria's borders as an intellectual voice of the country. Heer gave the founding generation its watchword of a conversation of enemies, a dialogue across the old political camps, and Austria-Forum credits that idea as central to the paper's founding purpose of reconciliation and intellectual reconstruction.

At the end of the 1960s the paper was shaken by a major ideological dispute over its direction. The conflict was recorded in the book Die zugepflügte Furche, written by the then Furche editor Trautl Brandstaller, and it centred on an attempt to move the newspaper, which had been shaped by the liberal Catholicism of Heer and others, onto a national-conservative course. The episode is an important part of the paper's history because it shows that the tension between openness and conservatism, written into its founding programme, was contested inside the newsroom itself, and that the liberal-Catholic character that survived became a deliberate choice rather than an accident.

Near Closure and the Styria Rescue

By the mid-1970s the turbulence of the preceding years, including its economic consequences, had brought Die Furche close to the end. In 1976 the Styria publishing house stepped in under its then general director Hanns Sassmann, who thereby became the paper's rescuer when it was practically facing closure. Sassmann led the Styria group from 1964 to 1994 and was also publisher of Die Furche from 1976 to 1994, and under his leadership Styria took over traditional newspapers including Die Furche and the daily Die Presse.

Today Die Furche is published by DIE FURCHE Zeitschriften-Betriebsgesellschaft m.b.H. and Co. KG and is majority owned by Styria Medien AG, the Graz-based Styria Media Group. Styria is one of Austria's largest media companies, founded in 1869, and on a national level it also publishes the Vienna-based daily Die Presse and the Kleine Zeitung, alongside its regional papers, magazines, websites and other media businesses in Austria, Croatia and Slovenia. For Die Furche, belonging to a large and stable group has provided the economic shelter that a small, demanding quality weekly, dependent on a loyal but limited readership, needs in order to survive in a concentrated Austrian press market dominated by much larger tabloid and daily titles.

Editors-in-Chief and Leadership

The succession of editors-in-chief charts the paper's modern history. After founder Friedrich Funder, from 1945 to 1954, and Kurt Skalnik, from 1954 to 1969, came Willy Lorenz from 1969 to 1975. Following the Styria rescue, Felix Gamillscheg led the paper from 1976 to 1978, and Hubert Feichtlbauer from 1978 to 1984 shaped it lastingly with an open-minded, liberal-bourgeois stance that was critically loyal on church questions. Hannes Schopf followed from 1984 to 1994, Heiner Boberski from 1995 to 2001, and Rudolf Mitlöhner from 2001 to 2008. Claus Reitan was editor-in-chief from 2008 to 2012, after which Mitlöhner returned, first in a shared editorial leadership in early 2013 and then as editor-in-chief from July 2013 to July 2019.

On 1 August 2019 Doris Helmberger-Fleckl became editor-in-chief, the first woman to hold the post. She had already been a member of the Furche editorial staff since 2000, had studied German language and literature and theology, and had been responsible for the society, education and science departments. She is the recipient of several journalism prizes, including an advancement prize for science journalism from the education ministry, the Inge Morath Prize for science journalism and a Cardinal Innitzer appreciation prize. On taking up the role she described what the paper strives for week after week as intellectual depth, breadth of discourse, a sense for existential questions and a clear stance on values such as human dignity, justice and sustainability, together with a joy in language and in stories away from the familiar.

Relaunches and the Move Online

Die Furche has repeatedly renewed its appearance and its platforms while keeping its weekly rhythm. A major relaunch in June 2002 was very positively received in the industry and was intended to underline visually the paper's repositioning of content. An online relaunch followed in October 2007, and a further comprehensive relaunch in 2008 was carried out by art director Dario Santangelo. The renewal of the online presence began again in April 2017, when Die Furche also became present on Facebook and Twitter.

A significant digital step came at the end of October 2019, when the paper made a digital archive available. Using a tool called the Navigator, readers could compare current contributions with others from the previous twenty years, and the Furche archive was intended ultimately to make 90,000 paper pages digitally accessible, turning more than seven decades of weekly journalism into a searchable record. Helmberger-Fleckl also pointed, on becoming editor-in-chief in 2019, to the paper's innovative website, its social media channels and its new podcast, weiter denken, as the channels through which a paper that had previously lived mainly on paper would now also address the digital world. The print weekly remains the core product, appearing on Thursdays, but the archive, website and podcast have widened the ways in which its long-form journalism can be found and reused.

Circulation, Publication Pattern and Reach

Die Furche appears weekly, on Thursdays, in German, from its headquarters in Vienna. Its print ISSN is 0016-299X. By the standards of Austria's mass-circulation tabloids its numbers are modest, which is consistent with its positioning as a quality weekly for a self-selecting readership of subscribers and committed readers rather than a mass market title. The Austrian circulation audit, the ÖAK, recorded a distributed circulation of 14,027 copies for the first half of 2022. Its sold circulation in the first half of 2019 was 11,244 copies, a decline of about twenty per cent over five years from 13,950 copies in the first half of 2015.

Those figures place Die Furche firmly in the small but durable niche of Austrian opinion and culture journalism. Its influence has never rested on volume alone, but on the standing of its contributors, the length and seriousness of its dossiers and essays, and the loyalty of readers who treat the Thursday edition as an appointment. In a national market described by Austria-Forum as characterised by large publishing houses and fierce competition from the Kronen Zeitung and other high-circulation titles, the survival of a weekly founded in 1945 with a circulation in the low tens of thousands is itself evidence of a stable, if specialised, audience.

Recognition and Place in Austrian Media

Die Furche has received professional recognition for its journalism, including the Concordia Prize in the press freedom category in 2003. More broadly, its place in Austrian media rests on continuity. Founded as a contribution to the intellectual rebuilding of the country and to reconciliation between its political camps, carried through an internal battle over its direction, rescued from near closure in 1976, and carried into the digital age without abandoning its print core, it has preserved a model of journalism that is increasingly rare: a weekly that assumes its readers want argument, context and reflection.

For readers in Vienna, across Austria and in the wider German-speaking world, Die Furche remains what its founding programme promised in September 1945: a furrow drawn through ground that needs to be worked, party-politically unbound, affirming democracy, guided by Catholic principles in a form that has become independent and open to other faiths and worldviews, and committed to tolerance. Its official home online is furche.at, where the current Thursday edition, its dossiers and its growing digital archive continue a publication history that began with a single issue on 1 December 1945.