About Bild-Telegraf

Bild-Telegraf

The Bild-Telegraf was an Austrian boulevard daily newspaper published in Vienna from 3 April 1954 until July 1958. Founded by three leading provincial newspaper proprietors as an independent, nationwide competitor to Vienna's Neuer Kurier, edited by the 28-year-old Gerd Bacher, and printed from 1955 at Fritz Molden's Pressehaus under a contract whose debt clause became notorious, it was fought over, duplicated and finally extinguished in the Wiener Zeitungskrieg, the Vienna newspaper war of March 1958 — the most famous press conflict of Austria's Second Republic. The paper is closed and is described here entirely in the past tense. Its short life, barely four years, is disproportionately well documented because the war over its corpse drew in both governing parties, the criminal court and international media attention.

Foundation on 3 April 1954 by three provincial publishers

The Bild-Telegraf was founded on 3 April 1954 by three representatives of local Austrian daily newspapers. Its founders were Gustav Canaval of the Salzburger Nachrichten, Hans Behrmann of the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten and Joseph Moser of the Tiroler Tageszeitung — the leading independent papers of Salzburg, Linz and Innsbruck respectively, each itself a product of the post-1945 licensing era. Their project was something Austria had not had: a boulevard newspaper independent from the outset, published nationwide, built to compete with Vienna's boulevard title, the Neuer Kurier of Ludwig Polsterer.

The provincial origin of the venture is essential to its story. In the early 1950s the relative weight of the Austrian press was shifting from Vienna toward the provinces, and the three founders embodied that shift: successful regional publishers attempting to conquer the capital's popular market from outside, rather than a Viennese house extending outward.

Gerd Bacher as editor-in-chief

As editor-in-chief the founders installed Gerd Bacher, then 28 years old, who had been local editor of the Salzburger Nachrichten and had already, at 21, taken part in founding the Salzburger Volkszeitung. Bacher went on to become one of the most influential figures in postwar Austrian media, several times director-general of the ORF broadcasting corporation, but the Bild-Telegraf was his first editorship of a national daily, and the energy of its challenge to the Neuer Kurier bore his stamp.

The paper quickly made, as the reference accounts put it, serious competition for Polsterer's Neuer Kurier. The rivalry was ruinous for both sides: because of their mutual competitive struggle, both newspapers were in a very poor financial position by the middle of the 1950s. Boulevard competition in the small Austrian market meant expensive promotion, price pressure and high production costs against a limited advertising pool, and the Bild-Telegraf's finances never recovered from the fight its launch had started.

The postwar setting: the discovery of the boulevard

The Bild-Telegraf belonged to a specific moment in Austrian press history. After 1945 the country's media had been rebuilt under occupation: the four Allied powers published their own papers, the three founding parties of the Second Republic published party newspapers, and independent dailies established themselves only slowly against paper scarcity. At the beginning of the 1950s, party newspapers and occupation media sharply lost importance across Austria, and in Vienna two boulevard papers were founded in response, both in 1954.

The first was the Neue Kurier, today's Kurier, which emerged from the American occupation paper Wiener Kurier, once the most-read newspaper in the country; when the Americans offered it for sale, Fritz Molden of Die Presse bid for it, but it went to the industrialist Ludwig A. Polsterer, acting with the lawyer and ÖVP politician Alfred Maleta. The second was the Bild-Telegraf. Austrian press statistics of the era summarise the outcome of the decade: party papers fell from about 60 per cent of total daily circulation in 1954 toward eventual marginality, while high-circulation boulevard titles concentrated the market. The Bild-Telegraf was born at exactly that hinge.

Printing at the Pressehaus and the two-million-Schilling clause

From 1955 the Bild-Telegraf was printed at the renowned Viennese Pressehaus on the Fleischmarkt, which the publisher Fritz Molden of Die Presse had leased. The arrangement arose from Molden's own difficulties: his quality paper Die Presse was doing badly financially in 1955, he leased the Pressehaus, one of Austria's most important printing plants, to cut his costs, and its capacity far exceeded his own paper's needs, so he sought printing partners.

Into the printing contract with the Bild-Telegraf, however, Molden had a fateful clause inserted. Because the boulevard paper was itself financially weak from its competition with the Neuer Kurier, the clause provided that as soon as the Bild-Telegraf's debts to Molden exceeded two million Schilling, Molden would be entitled to publish a similar newspaper. The clause in effect converted the printer into a creditor with a contractual right to clone his own customer. It was the legal seed of the newspaper war.

12 March 1958: bankruptcy petition and the takeover of the newsroom

On 12 March 1958 the moment arrived. The Bild-Telegraf's debts to Molden passed the agreed two million Schilling, and Molden, among several creditors, filed a bankruptcy petition against the newspaper. He took over the entire editorial staff of the Bild-Telegraf in order to publish with it the Bildtelegramm, a newspaper identical to the Bild-Telegraf in appearance and content.

The Bild-Telegraf's management disputed the premise: it maintained that the debt had been only 500,000 Schilling, which could readily have been paid, and that Molden had refused payments and had the paper removed from the Pressehaus more or less without cause. Molden in turn claimed the paper's managers had asked him to take over the newsroom for his new title and had told the staff, in effect, that they were finished and should go to Molden. These contested versions were never merely commercial: behind them stood Austria's two governing parties.

The hot phase: two near-identical papers at the kiosk

On 13 March 1958, in place of the Bild-Telegraf, the Bildtelegramm appeared for the first time, published by Fritz Molden in a layout barely distinguishable from the original. It was designed to make readers believe a mere renaming had taken place: the same price, the same columns in the same places, the same advertising slogan, and even a newsroom telephone number modelled on the old one, differing by a single digit. Molden housed almost the whole former Bild-Telegraf newsroom, including editor-in-chief Gerd Bacher, at the new paper.

On 17 March 1958 the Bild-Telegraf reappeared — now published by Ludwig A. Polsterer, who had taken it over with ÖVP money provided through Fritz Polcar, and produced by the newsroom of the Neuer Kurier, which suddenly had to make two papers with the same staff. Confusion at the newsstand was complete: two papers of similar title and nearly interchangeable layout and content lay side by side, each devoting its front pages to discrediting the other, while Die Presse and the Kurier, themselves parties to the war, and later the ÖVP-aligned Kleine Volksblatt and the SPÖ's Arbeiter-Zeitung, joined the polemics.

The political anatomy of the fight then became public. The suspicion that the ÖVP had an interest in the bankruptcy of a competitor of its allied Neuer Kurier was, as the reference accounts note, unproven but not absurd; Molden believed the ÖVP intended to buy the Bild-Telegraf through front men and possess both of the city's main boulevard papers, and he had aligned himself with the SPÖ, whose future justice minister Christian Broda promised him financial support in the emergency. On 20 March 1958 the criminal court intervened amid a flood of complaints for theft, defamation and credit damage, and the printing plates bearing the Bildtelegramm masthead were seized; recent issues of the combatant papers were confiscated, and the Bildtelegramm was forbidden to appear under that name, continuing briefly without a title, its masthead replaced by the slogan announcing that its title had been seized. SPÖ vice-chancellor Bruno Pittermann proposed to ÖVP chancellor Julius Raab the audit everyone wanted, by the Court of Audit; the SPÖ admitted financially supporting Molden and the Bildtelegramm, and the ÖVP admitted its stakes in the Bild-Telegraf.

End of the war and closure of the paper

On 25 March 1958 the Vienna newspaper war ended. The former Bildtelegramm ceased publication and was succeeded by the newspaper Express, produced by the same newsroom under Molden and Bacher. The Bild-Telegraf itself, still produced by Hans Dichand and the Neuer Kurier newsroom, continued for a few more months and then, on 23 July 1958, ceased publication without replacement. The title founded in April 1954 was dead at four years old, killed not by readers deserting it but by debt, contract and party-political proxy war.

The immediate consequences were surprisingly limited: there was no coalition crisis between SPÖ and ÖVP and no lasting crisis of the Austrian newspaper market. Molden remained at Die Presse; Hans Dichand, with a loan from the trade union federation, founded the Neue Kronen Zeitung on 11 April 1959, which became Austria's dominant tabloid. Historians classify the newspaper war both as a kind of Sturm und Drang of Austrian boulevard journalism and as a last attempt by the great parties to secure long-term influence over print media as the party press slowly died — an attempt that failed.

What cannot be verified

The documentation of the Bild-Telegraf is rich on its ownership, contract and collapse but thin on its ordinary editorial life. Verified circulation figures across its run are not stated in the sources consulted here, and claims about which side's account of the March 1958 debts was correct — two million Schilling owed, or only 500,000 refused — remain contested claims by the parties, reported above as such, not as settled fact. Details of the paper's section structure beyond its boulevard character, and of staff other than Bacher, are not consistently documented in accessible references, and this profile does not invent them.

Legacy and availability today

The Bild-Telegraf's legacy is the affair that consumed it. The Wiener Zeitungskrieg is a standard episode in Austrian media history, treated in memoirs such as Hans Dichand's Im Vorhof der Macht and in Peter Muzik's history of Austria's newspaper makers, and the Bild-Telegraf is listed in the national newspaper lists as a defunct daily with a cross-reference to that conflict. Its successor titles went separate ways: Molden's Express ran from 1958 to 1971, and the Krone, founded by the war's Kurier-side editor Dichand, inherited the boulevard market the Bild-Telegraf had fought for.

As a directory record, then, the Bild-Telegraf stands as the Second Republic's clearest cautionary tale about the economics of boulevard competition: launched on 3 April 1954 by Gustav Canaval, Hans Behrmann and Joseph Moser to challenge the Neuer Kurier from the provinces, edited by Gerd Bacher, bound to its printer by a two-million-Schilling clause, duplicated by that printer as the Bildtelegramm in March 1958, rescued briefly as a party-backed shell, and closed on 23 July 1958.