About Der Abend

Der Abend

Der Abend, The Evening, was a German-language evening daily newspaper published in Vienna in two distinct lives. The first Der Abend was founded on 14 June 1915, during the First World War, by the publisher Carl Colbert, and grew from a left-liberal paper into a polemical, pacifist-socialist evening paper famous for its investigative exposures of Austria's banking scandals. It was shut down on 16 February 1934, days after the February Uprising, and continued under the successor title Telegraph until 1938. The second Der Abend was founded after the war by Bruno Frei, the first paper's former contributor returned from Mexican exile, and appeared as a Communist-near daily from 1948 to 1957. Between them, the two papers bearing the name spanned the fall of the monarchy, the First Republic, Austrofascism and the first decade of the Second Republic.

Evening papers were the street-sale press of old Vienna: sold by vendors on the afternoon streets, written fast, read on the tram, and built for sensation and immediacy rather than for the subscription library. Der Abend was one of the most characteristic of them, and its first incarnation earned a lasting place in economic history because its reporters understood Austria's banks earlier, and wrote about them more aggressively, than almost anyone else in the Viennese press.

Carl Colbert and the Founding in 1915

Der Abend was founded in Vienna in 1915, during the First World War, by Carl Colbert. Colbert, born Carl Cohn to a Viennese family that ran the Mercur exchange office and lottery-list paper, had changed his name to Colbert in 1887, co-founded the illustrated fashion magazine Wiener Mode, written the libretto for Johann Strauss's unfinished ballet Aschenbrödel, and, in 1910, founded with Maximilian Schreier the Monday newspaper Der Morgen. Der Abend was originally intended to complement Der Morgen, the weekly Monday paper, as its daily evening counterpart.

The new paper did not stay a mere supplement to its sibling. The two publications soon developed apart, and Der Abend found its own line: at first left-liberal, it developed into a pacifist and socialist paper, a remarkable trajectory for a wartime foundation published under Habsburg censorship, which banned it repeatedly during the war. Colbert, a left-liberal patron who supported politicians such as Ferdinand Kronawetter and Julius Ofner and the secular Freie Schule movement, gave young, radical journalists room that few Viennese publishers offered.

From Left-Liberal to Pacifist-Socialist

After 1918 the paper's tone became increasingly polemical and aggressive, and it reflected the thought of Social Democracy and of Communism. In the ANU Museum's survey of the Viennese press, Der Abend appears as a leading example of the boulevard press of the early republic: funded by Colbert, it employed the radical journalist Bruno Frei, who had grown up in a strictly orthodox Jewish house and regarded his socialism as founded on the biblical idea of justice, and it published the early social-critical reportage of writers including Else Feldmann, one of Vienna's finest reporters of poverty and women's lives.

Frei's later career framed the paper's politics: he went on to edit the Communist Volksstimme after 1945. When he left Der Abend, the paper was edited in a later phase by Alexander Weiss, who, in the survey's severe judgement, dedicated it to unmitigated sensationalism. Between Frei's socialism and Weiss's sensation, the paper's interwar identity oscillated, but its investigative reporting on money and power remained constant, and it is for that reporting that historians still cite it.

Investigative Journalism: The Bank Scandals

Der Abend practised exposé journalism, Enthüllungsjournalismus, and its campaigns are still used by economic historians. On 30 June 1926 it reported the crisis of the Centralbank der deutschen Sparkassen, the central bank of the German savings banks, and in the autumn of 1926 it followed with a series of articles on the Postsparkasse scandal, the postal savings bank affair that shook the republic's finances and its government. In October 1929 it thematised the crisis of the Bodencreditanstalt early, the great land-credit bank whose collapse that month, and forced absorption by the Creditanstalt, began the unravelling that ended in the Creditanstalt crash of 1931 and the European banking crisis.

To have been early and aggressive on all three affairs, the savings banks, the postal savings bank and the Bodencreditanstalt, gave Der Abend a record no Viennese rival matched. Financial historians quoting the paper today are not indulging nostalgia for the boulevard: on the central economic story of the First Republic, the corruption and fragility of its banks, the little evening paper was frequently the best-informed publication in the capital, and its reports are primary evidence for how much was knowable, and known, before each collapse.

Censorship and the Wartime Paper

The first Der Abend's relationship with authority was adversarial from birth. Founded in wartime, it was banned by the censor several times during the First World War, a distinction it shared with few respectable papers and which its pacifist turn made almost routine. The HYPRESS bibliographic record of the Austrian Academy of Sciences preserves the paper's broken wartime rhythm in its run dates: publication from 14 June 1915 to 20 February 1917, resuming 7 March 1917 to 18 March 1918, and again from 10 June 1918 to 30 October 1918, the gaps marking suspensions, before the continuous republican run from 31 October 1918 to 16 February 1934.

In the republic the pressure changed form rather than ceasing. The paper's polemics made it enemies in every camp, and after Chancellor Dollfuß suspended parliament in March 1933 and moved against the Social Democrats, an evening paper of socialist temper, however independent, had no future. Its end came with the February Uprising itself.

Closure in 1934 and the Telegraph Successor

Der Abend was discontinued on 16 February 1934, immediately after the end of the February Uprising, the brief civil war in which the Dollfuß regime crushed the Social Democratic movement and banned its press. The date ties the paper's death directly to the destruction of Austrian democracy's left half: the Arbeiter-Zeitung was banned in the same days, and Das Kleine Blatt was suspended and captured.

From 1934 to March 1938 the paper's place was taken by a successor, the Telegraph, published in its stead through the years of the Austrofascist state until the Anschluss ended that order too. The bibliographic record lists the Telegraph as the Abend's side edition and successor in those years, and the Telegraph am Mittag thereafter. The Evening's own name then disappeared for a decade, until its former contributor brought it back in a different Austria and a different cause.

The Second Der Abend: Bruno Frei, 1948 to 1957

After the liberation of 1945, Bruno Frei, who had returned from Mexican exile, was commissioned to found a new daily newspaper. He named it Der Abend. The revived paper was regarded as close to the Communist Party, the KPÖ, and it appeared from 1948 to 1957, with its first issues dated from 25 February 1948 in the media timeline of Austrian newspaper foundings. Frei, who had learned his journalism on Colbert's Abend before the war and had edited the Communist Volksstimme, thus edited both the first paper's radical youth and the second paper's whole life.

The second Der Abend operated in the crowded, licensed press market of occupied Austria, alongside the party papers of the SPÖ, ÖVP and KPÖ, the four occupation powers' newspapers and the emerging independent press. As the KPÖ's vote and influence shrank after the early post-war years, a Communist-near commercial daily became unsustainable, and the paper ceased in 1957, with its final phase dated to the autumn of 1956 in some timeline records and its run given generally as 1948 to 1957. No third revival followed.

Journalists and Contributors

The names attached to Der Abend map a whole milieu of left Viennese journalism. Carl Colbert founded and funded the first paper. Bruno Frei was its defining radical journalist and the founder-editor of its second life. Else Feldmann published her first social-critical reportage in its columns, writing on the poor, on women and on children in a Vienna whose official press largely ignored them. Ernst Wimmer is also listed among its journalists. Alexander Weiss, its later editor, represents the paper's sensationalist phase, remembered without affection by press historians.

That a fashion-magazine publisher's evening paper should have employed, in sequence, a future Communist editor-in-chief, a canonical reporter of Viennese poverty, and a byword for sensationalism is not a contradiction; it is a portrait of the Viennese popular press itself, where money, ideology and talent mixed in proportions no party office would have designed.

Archive and Research Value

The first Der Abend is documented in the standard Austrian retrospective bibliography of newspapers, in Helmut W. Lang's ORBI volumes produced at the Austrian National Library, and it has attracted modern monographic attention through Alexander Emanuely's study of Colbert, Das Beispiel Colbert, published in 2020, which treats the publisher and his papers as a case study of Vienna between fin de siècle and republic. Commercial archives also preserve runs of the paper from the interwar years, including issues from 1930 to 1933 most frequently offered to researchers and collectors.

For researchers, the paper's value concentrates in three areas: the financial scandals of the 1920s, where its reporting is a primary source; the social reportage of Feldmann and her colleagues, a source for the history of poverty and gender in Red Vienna; and the history of the evening press itself, the street-sale journalism that set the tempo of the capital's public conversation between the wars.

Place in Austrian Press History

Der Abend stood, among Vienna's evening papers, for the investigative boulevard: cheaper and faster than the morning quality press, more serious than its sensational reputation, and, on banks at least, better than both. Its two lives bookend the Austrian century's middle: founded under an emperor at war in 1915, killed by one dictatorship in 1934, revived under occupation in 1948 and closed in the young Second Republic in 1957. Few titles touch so many of the era's regimes while remaining, in both lives, a paper of the left.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these. Der Abend was a German-language evening daily published in Vienna, founded by Carl Colbert with a first issue on 14 June 1915 as a complement to Der Morgen; it moved from a left-liberal to a pacifist-socialist line, exposed the Centralbank, Postsparkasse and Bodencreditanstalt affairs of 1926 to 1929, and was closed on 16 February 1934, with the Telegraph as its successor to 1938; a second Der Abend, founded by Bruno Frei and close to the KPÖ, appeared from 1948 to 1957. Both papers are closed, and the title is recorded here in the past tense.