About Neues Wiener Tagblatt

Neues Wiener Tagblatt

The Neues Wiener Tagblatt was a German-language daily newspaper published in Vienna from 1867 to 1945. For much of its life it was Vienna's highest-circulation quality newspaper, the great mass-market rival of the Neue Freie Presse, and one of the most successful advertising vehicles in the Habsburg monarchy. Founded in the year of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, it lived through the liberal era, the First World War and the First Republic, before the Nazi regime seized it in 1938, folded Austria's other great liberal titles into it, and ran it as Vienna's principal daily until its last issue on 7 April 1945, as the Battle of Vienna began.

The paper's story is therefore two stories. The first is a classic nineteenth-century press success: a liberal, democratic-minded paper built by the publisher Moritz Szeps into the monarchy's best-selling quality daily. The second is a story of expropriation: a Jewish-founded liberal institution taken over on the very evening of the Anschluss, sold under compulsion to a Berlin trust, and used for seven years as the central organ of Nazi Vienna, absorbing the Neue Freie Presse and the Neues Wiener Journal on the way. Both stories are documented in unusual detail because, uniquely among Viennese newspapers, the Tagblatt's own archive survived the war.

Founding in 1867: Mayer, Szeps and the Morgen-Post

The newspaper was founded by Eduard Mayer as a successor to the Wiener Journal. Its first issue appeared on 10 March 1867, the year of the Compromise with Hungary and of the December Constitution that governed Cisleithanian Austria until 1918. Mayer's founding role is sometimes compressed in short references, which credit Szeps alone; the fuller record is that Mayer launched the paper and Szeps took it over within months. On 13 July 1867 the publisher Moritz Szeps, who had left the Morgen-Post newspaper after a dispute, took control of the young Tagblatt.

Szeps, born in Busk in 1835 and trained first in medicine in Lemberg and Vienna before turning to journalism, was one of the great press entrepreneurs of the monarchy. He remained the paper's sole owner and publisher until 15 May 1872, when he contributed it to the Steyrermühl publishing house, which he had co-founded that year, and he continued as its publisher in his capacity as a shareholder until 15 October 1886. The Steyrermühl connection, a paper-making and publishing group, gave the Tagblatt the industrial base that underpinned its growth for the next sixty years.

Vienna's Highest-Circulation Quality Paper

From 1874 onward, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt was Vienna's highest-circulation newspaper. Austria-Forum's encyclopedia describes it as very soon becoming Vienna's highest-circulation quality paper and a successful advertising vehicle, appearing at times with midday and evening editions in addition to the main morning paper. Its combination, mass reach with a quality-paper reputation, made it the strongest competitor of the Neue Freie Presse: where the Presse was the more prestigious cultural authority, the Tagblatt reached more readers.

Szeps knew how to serve the prosperity-seeking, commercial spirit of Vienna's rising middle classes. The paper was committed to liberalism and good causes and had a pronounced Francophile orientation in foreign affairs. Its most celebrated campaign began in 1870, when Szeps backed Josef Schöffel's fight to save the Vienna Woods from sell-off and development. The campaign succeeded, and the preservation of the forest belt around Vienna is still counted among the paper's greatest achievements, an early example of newspaper campaigning changing public policy.

Crown Prince Rudolf and the Democratic Voice

The Tagblatt's foreign-policy outlook reached into the imperial family itself. Szeps's connection to Crown Prince Rudolf, the liberal-minded heir of Franz Joseph, meant that anonymous political texts by the crown prince could repeatedly appear in the paper, arguing for the liberal, progressive development of Austria. The arrangement was extraordinary: the heir to the throne used a bourgeois newspaper to publish, unsigned, views he could not avow at court. It testified both to Szeps's connections and to the paper's standing as the monarchy's unofficial liberal forum.

The paper proudly proclaimed itself a democratic voice in every edition up to 12 March 1938, the day the Anschluss took effect. Its political character in the monarchy was German-liberal and anti-Marxist, although it never developed a clear stance toward the emerging mass parties, the Christian Socials and the Social Democrats, that were transforming Austrian politics around it. That ambiguity, comfortable in the liberal era, became harder to sustain in the polarised republic that followed the First World War.

Editors and Contributors

After Szeps, the paper's editors-in-chief included Moriz Wengraf, who served until October 1891, and Wilhelm Singer, who led it until his death on 10 October 1917, through the outbreak of the First World War. In the republic, the long-serving editor was Emil Löbl, who remained in post until the evening of 11 March 1938, when he was removed in the Nazi takeover. Under the regime the chief editorship passed rapidly through Heinrich Eichinger, Erwin H. Rainalter and Walter Petwaidic, before Otto Häcker held it from 1 April 1941 to 5 April 1945, in the paper's final phase.

The contributor list reflected the paper's breadth. Among its notable employees and writers were Hermann Bahr, the man of letters who mediated modernism to Viennese readers; Werner Bergengruen; Franz Karl Ginzkey; the music writer Ludwig Karpath; the philosopher-physicist Ernst Mach; Eduard Pötzl; Heinrich Pollak; Karl Tschuppik; Moriz Scheyer; and Fritz Sänger. A literary history of the paper's feuilleton between the wars was already the subject of a University of Vienna study in 1951, an early sign of the archive's research value.

The First Republic: Sieghart, Steyrermühl and 1933

In the First Republic, the Tagblatt's politics changed with its ownership structure. Published by the Steyrermühl group, it became the political mouthpiece of Rudolf Sieghart, the autocratic head of the Bodencreditanstalt, one of Austria's great banks, which financed Steyrermühl. Under that influence the paper's line supported the Heimwehren, the right-wing paramilitary movement, and the policies of the Christian Social Party, a marked departure from its liberal origins. The line did not change even after the Bodencreditanstalt collapsed in October 1929 and Sieghart withdrew, one of the financial catastrophes that destabilised the young republic.

In March 1933, when Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß shut down parliament and began Austria's turn to authoritarian rule, the newspaper welcomed the shutdown, although it expressed concern about the preservation of freedom of expression. The position captured the paper's interwar trajectory: a once-liberal giant, now bank-owned and right-leaning, accommodating itself to the end of democracy five years before the Nazis arrived to end its independence altogether.

Seizure in 1938 and Forced Sale

The end came with brutal speed. After Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany in March 1938, the newspaper was immediately put at the service of the Nazi propaganda apparatus. On the evening of 11 March 1938, before the Wehrmacht had even marched in, editor-in-chief Emil Löbl was replaced by a Nazi party member. The paper that had called itself a democratic voice in every edition until that week became, overnight, a regime organ, and its correspondence columns in April 1938 filled with coded cries for help from desperate readers, as later historians documented from its own pages.

On 27 July 1938 the owners were forced to sell the newspaper to a Berlin trust company, which on 15 September 1938 incorporated it into the new Ostmärkische Zeitungsverlagsgesellschaft, the Austrian newspaper publishing company behind whose front man stood the Nazi Party's own publishing house, the Franz Eher Verlag. The expropriation was part of the systematic Aryanisation of the Austrian press, in which Jewish-owned and liberal titles were seized, sold at dictated prices or closed.

Absorbing the Neue Freie Presse and the Final Years

On 31 January 1939 the Neues Wiener Journal was discontinued and, together with the venerable Neue Freie Presse, was incorporated into the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. The merger made the Tagblatt, under total Nazi control, Vienna's principal daily, the surviving shell into which the regime poured the readerships of the liberal press it had destroyed. The National Socialist press authorities had deliberately not suppressed the Tagblatt in 1938, choosing instead to make it their central press organ in Austria, a decision that prolonged the title's life by seven years at the price of its soul.

The paper appeared through the Second World War as a Nazi daily. Its last issue was published on 7 April 1945, in the final weeks of the war, as the Battle of Vienna began and the Red Army fought into the city. With that issue, a title founded in the liberal spring of 1867, seventy-eight years earlier, ceased to exist; no post-war publisher revived it.

The Tagblatt Archive

One part of the newspaper survived intact. The extensive Tagblatt archive was the only Viennese newspaper archive to survive the war. In 1945 it was taken over by the communist Globus publishing house, which the Soviet occupying power had designated as the user of the Steyrermühl structures, and it later passed to the Vienna Chamber of Labour. Since 2002 the Tagblatt archive has formed part of the holdings of the Vienna Library in City Hall, the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, where it remains available to researchers.

The paper itself is also fully readable in digitised form: the Austrian National Library's ANNO portal carries the Neues Wiener Tagblatt's daily and weekly editions across its whole run. Between the surviving clipping archive and the digitised run, the Tagblatt is among the best-documented newspapers of old Vienna, used constantly by historians of politics, literature, Jewish life and everyday affairs.

Place in Austrian Press History

In the history of the Austrian press, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt stands as the monarchy's most commercially successful quality daily and as the clearest case study of what happened to that press in 1938. It was German-language and Viennese, liberal and democratic in its great period, bank-influenced and authoritarian-leaning in the republic, and a Nazi central organ in its imposed afterlife. Its list of distinctions includes the Vienna Woods campaign, the Crown Prince's anonymous articles, the highest circulation in the capital from 1874, and the melancholy distinction of outliving, by absorbing them, its rivals, the very papers, the Neue Freie Presse and the Neues Wiener Journal, with which it had competed for seventy years.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these. The Neues Wiener Tagblatt was founded by Eduard Mayer, with its first issue on 10 March 1867; Moritz Szeps took it over on 13 July 1867 and built it, within the Steyrermühl group he co-founded, into Vienna's highest-circulation quality paper; it was seized by the Nazi regime on 11 March 1938, forcibly sold that July, absorbed the Neue Freie Presse and the Neues Wiener Journal on 31 January 1939, and published its last issue on 7 April 1945. It is a closed newspaper, written about here in the past tense, and it has no successor under its name.