About Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung

Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung

The Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung was an Austrian weekly newspaper published in Vienna from 1863 to 1936. Founded by the journalist and industrialist Alexander Scharf as the Wiener Sonntagszeitung, it filled a distinctive gap in the Viennese week: it was put into circulation on Sunday afternoons, when the daily papers did not appear, and from 1867 it added a Monday-morning edition, long after which the combined name survived even though the Sunday edition itself was dropped in 1885. Interwar, under Ernst Klebinder, it reinvented itself with a sensational layout, caricature in place of the editorial, expanded sport and a picture-paper format. It was a different publication from the Wiener Zeitung, the state newspaper founded in 1703, despite the similarity of their names, and it is described here wholly in the past tense, as a closed newspaper.

Foundation by Alexander Scharf in 1863

The newspaper was founded in 1863 by Alexander Scharf (1834-1904), a journalist who had come to Vienna from Hungary, where he had first been a merchant, and who had worked in Viennese journalism since the 1850s. Before the Sunday paper, Scharf had published the lottery paper Fortuna and a stock-exchange correspondence service, and from 1865 to 1873 he also published the Wiener Börsen-Zeitung. Financial journalism was his apprenticeship, and it shaped the paper he founded.

Scharf modelled the new publication on the British Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. The first issue of the Wiener Sonntagszeitung appeared on 26 April 1863. The paper was distributed from about 2 p.m. on Sundays and public holidays, a deliberate occupation of the one day on which Vienna's daily press was silent and its cafe and promenade public had leisure to read. Scharf led the paper until his death in 1904, at times also serving as its editor-in-chief.

The Monday edition and the settled title, 1867

From 26 May 1867 the offering was extended by a Monday morning paper, and the title was changed to Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, the Vienna Sunday and Monday Newspaper. Still in the same year, the Sunday edition was separated from the Monday edition. The Sunday edition was then discontinued in 1885, but the title of the newspaper remained unchanged, so that for the last fifty years of its life the paper's name commemorated a Sunday paper that no longer existed as a separate edition, while the Monday paper, carrying the fresh results and reports of the weekend, became the effective publication.

The timing mattered. Monday was the day on which the weekend's sport, theatre, markets and political events could first be reported in print to a mass public, and a Monday-morning title held a natural advantage in that market which the paper's twentieth-century expansion of sports reporting later exploited systematically.

Alexander Scharf: publisher, liberal and litigant

Scharf was more than a newspaper founder. He was the general representative of the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company and, according to the Viennese historian Felix Czeike as cited in the reference literature, was involved in founding the first Austrian insurance syndicate. In 1891 he founded, with his son Paul, the electric light-bulb factory Watt, whose products later carried the Tungsram brand. His speculation business built a considerable fortune and gave him, as the biographical references note plainly, a mixed reputation.

His politics were anticlerical and moderately liberal. He opposed the Christian Socials and in particular Karl Lueger, Vienna's populist mayor, against whom he conducted a sensational press trial and secured Lueger's conviction. The episode captures the paper's place in the liberal Vienna of the late Monarchy: a Jewish-owned, commercially successful press enterprise in open conflict with the antisemitic mass movement that was capturing the city's government. Scharf, who was also an art collector, died on 4 November 1904 in Vienna and was buried in the family vault in the old Israelite section of Vienna's Central Cemetery.

The paper in late-imperial Vienna

Through the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung belonged to the group of Viennese newspapers with Jewish owners or publishers that structured the capital's press landscape, alongside titles such as the Neues Wiener Tagblatt and the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung. Scholarship on fin-de-siècle Viennese popular culture lists it in that company and points to the large Jewish participation in Vienna's press as owners, editors and journalists — a fact of press history that antisemitic agitation of the period exaggerated into conspiracy propaganda, but whose underlying commercial reality the Sunday and Monday paper exemplified.

The paper's Sunday and Monday rhythm made it a natural carrier of the weekend's cultural life: theatre premieres reviewed, concerts, exhibitions, sport and the financial week's opening prices. Precise circulation figures for the title are not given in the accessible references used here, and none are invented in this profile; its longevity, from 1863 into the 1930s, is itself the evidence that it held a durable niche.

After the First World War: Julius Scharf and transition

After the First World War and the collapse of the Monarchy in 1918, the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung remained, until 1920, under the direction of the publisher Julius Scharf. The paper thus passed from the imperial capital it was founded in into the small, impoverished Austrian Republic, whose press market contracted sharply with the loss of the Monarchy's territory and readership.

In 1920 the succession changed. Ernst Klebinder took over, and under him the seventy-year-old weekly was made over for the competitive, visual, boulevard-influenced market of the First Republic.

The Klebinder makeover: caricature, sport and pictures

Klebinder gave the newspaper what the German reference account calls a sensational presentation. The number of illustrations was increased. Most strikingly, the leading article, the Leitartikel that traditionally opened a serious Viennese paper with political commentary, was replaced by a topical caricature: comment by drawing rather than by essay, on the front page. From 1922 the sports reporting was expanded, reflecting the mass spectator sport culture of interwar Vienna and the Monday paper's natural ownership of the weekend's results. In 1925 a separate picture paper, a Bildzeitung in the paper's own terminology of the time, was introduced.

From 1927 the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung also published a side edition, the Wiener Morgenpost. Viennese newspaper listings record a Wiener Montagspost running from 21 February 1927 to 27 April 1936, dates that track the final decade of the parent paper's family of titles, although the exact relationship of titles and side editions in these years is compressed in the listings and should be read as the documentation presents it rather than simplified.

Final years and closure in 1936

The Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung ceased publication in 1936, after a run of seventy-three years. It closed in the Austria of the authoritarian corporate state that followed the civil war of February 1934, a period in which the Viennese press operated under government pressure and many titles founded in the liberal nineteenth century ended; its own stablemate tradition, the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, had been forced to close in February 1934, two years earlier. No revival of the Sunday and Monday title followed the Second World War, and the name survived only in press-historical records.

Distinguishing the title from other Viennese papers

Because Viennese newspaper names are easily confused, the distinctions matter. The Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung was not the Wiener Zeitung, the government newspaper descended from the Wiennerisches Diarium of 1703, which continued, with interruptions, into the twenty-first century. It was not the Wiener Sonntagszeitung as a generic label but a specific title that began under that name in 1863. It was not the Christian-social Wiener Neueste Nachrichten, which also used a Sunday and Monday subtitle in its early years; that was a separate, confessionally aligned competitor founded in the 1890s. And its Monday-paper identity differed from the daily press rhythm of Vienna's morning and evening dailies: it existed for the weekend gap.

What cannot be verified

The accessible reference record for this newspaper concentrates on its foundation, its founder, its title history and its interwar makeover. It does not provide verified circulation figures, advertising rates, staff lists for most of its run, or the names of its editors-in-chief between Alexander Scharf's death in 1904 and Julius Scharf's tenure after 1918, and this profile does not supply such details from imagination. The reason for its final closure in 1936 is recorded as fact, not explained, in the sources consulted; the political and economic pressures on independent Viennese titles in the mid-1930s are the documented context, not a documented cause specific to this paper. Where older accounts give differing details about the side editions of 1927 onwards, the discrepancy is noted above rather than concealed.

Legacy and availability today

The Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung is preserved in the historical newspaper collections documented by the Austrian National Library's ANNO programme and is recorded in the City of Vienna's newspaper listings with its first issue on 26 April 1863. Its front page of 7 May 1900 is reproduced in reference works as an example of its mature imperial-era presentation, and its founder's biography keeps its name present in Viennese press historiography.

For the directory reader, its significance is threefold. It was a pioneer of Sunday publishing in Vienna, modelled deliberately on the London Observer. It was a durable liberal commercial paper whose founder fought and won a celebrated press case against Karl Lueger. And it demonstrated, in Klebinder's caricature-led, sport-heavy, picture-rich makeover of the 1920s, how a nineteenth-century weekly adapted, for a time successfully, to the visual mass press of the twentieth century — before closing, as so many of its generation did, in 1936.