About Der Neue Tag (Wien)

Der Neue Tag (Wien)

Der Neue Tag was a daily newspaper published in Vienna, Austria, from 23 March 1919 to 30 April 1920. Founded as the successor to the Fremden-Blatt, published by the Elbemühl paper concern, sold at 30 Heller a copy, and edited by the declared Social Democrat Benno Karpeles under a contractual guarantee of complete independence from its owners, it lived for only thirteen months. In that short life it assembled one of the most remarkable staffs in Viennese press history — Alfred Polgar ran its feuilleton, Egon Erwin Kisch wrote sensation and crime reports, and the young Joseph Roth found there his first permanent job and published more than a hundred pieces. Modelled on the Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, republican and reformist in programme, it closed for economic reasons in the hunger-and-inflation spring of 1920. It was a distinct Austrian title, unrelated to later German newspapers of the same name, and it is described here entirely in the past tense.

Founded as successor to the Fremden-Blatt, 23 March 1919

Der Neue Tag was founded on 23 March 1919 as the successor of the Fremden-Blatt, the Viennese daily that had appeared since 1847 and had been one of the Monarchy's semi-official voices. The setting was the wreckage of empire: Austria-Hungary had collapsed in the autumn of 1918, the Republic of German-Austria had been proclaimed, and Vienna was a capital without its hinterland, short of food, coal and paper. The new paper appeared in the publishing house of the Elbemühl paper concern and was sold for 30 Heller per copy.

Its very first issue, on 23 March 1919, opened with an obituary for the Fremden-Blatt and under its programmatic title, though, as the University of Klagenfurt's literary lexicon of the 1920s notes, without a declaratory opening statement. The title itself was the declaration: a new day for a new republic. The paper was to concern itself especially with the current problems and developments of the newly created Republic of Austria, taking as its models the Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, the two great liberal German dailies of the age.

Benno Karpeles and the guarantee of independence

The editor the publishers secured was Benno Karpeles (1868-1938), a declared Social Democrat and a former senior functionary of the Social Democratic cooperative movement, who had founded the pacifist weekly Der Friede at the beginning of 1918 as an answer to the warmongering Reichspost. Karpeles was contractually assured complete independence from any instructions of the owners — an unusual and deliberate foundation for a paper owned by a paper-industry concern. When Der Friede ceased in August 1919, many of its roughly two hundred contributors had already migrated to Karpeles's daily, which had been launched five months earlier.

Karpeles set the paper's motto as a fight in the service of the republic, of democracy, of social reform and of the renewal of public life. He had left the Social Democratic Workers' Party after the death of Viktor Adler, amid a strained relationship following corruption allegations, and his paper's left-intellectual independence brought it into sharp exchanges with the party's own Arbeiter-Zeitung as well as with the conservative press, which commented on the feud with an antisemitic undertone. Der Neue Tag was thus nobody's party organ: it was a proprietor-financed, editor-led republican daily, a fragile construction that depended entirely on Karpeles's guarantee holding and on money lasting.

The newsroom in Grünangergasse: Polgar, Tschuppik and the staff

The editorial office was at Grünangergasse 2 in Vienna's first district. Karl Tschuppik served as chief of service and political editor, a role he had also held at Der Friede. The feuilleton, the cultural section that was the glory of the Viennese press, was led by Alfred Polgar (1873-1955), the master of the short prose form, who had the decisive influence on the paper's literary character and who personally promoted its youngest recruit.

Around them, during the paper's thirteen months, worked or contributed a constellation that makes Der Neue Tag a fixed point in literary history. Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948), later famous as the raging reporter, was responsible for sensation reports, criminal cases and socially critical reportage — among them the piece on how the burglar Breitwieser was shot. Anton Kuh (1890-1941), the great Viennese aphorist and cabaret voice, contributed from the first issue, whose contents also included Arnold Höllriegel, Robert Musil, with Die Affeninsel, and Polgar himself. Stefan Großmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Olden, Hans Tietze, Walter Tschuppik, Fritz von Unruh and Egon Wellesz all appeared as contributors. Leo Perutz's novel Der Marqués de Bolibar and Henri Barbusse's Die Erleuchtung were serialised in its pages.

Joseph Roth's first permanent job

For literary history, the paper's most consequential staff member was Joseph Roth (1894-1939). At Der Neue Tag Roth found his first permanent position, his first Festanstellung, and there, under the pseudonym Josephus, he published over a hundred contributions, particularly on everyday life in Vienna. Polgar promoted him as feuilletonist and reporter, and in the rubric Wiener Symptome, Viennese Symptoms, which he shared principally with Höllriegel, Roth wrote his first socially critical feuilletons and reports.

His first article was Die Insel der Unseligen, The Island of the Unhappy, of 20 April 1919, about the psychiatric institution at Steinhof. On the paper's behalf he also reported from the Heanzenland, the German-speaking west of Hungary that is today Burgenland, then disputed between Austria and Hungary. Pieces such as Kaffeehausfrühling of May 1919 and Papier of October 1919, and Das Antlitz der Zeit at New Year 1920, are documented in the scholarly record of the paper. When the paper folded in 1920, Roth moved to Berlin; the apprenticeship at Der Neue Tag had made him a professional journalist, and the Vienna he learned to observe there became the material of his novels. His early work for the paper was later collected in the 1970 volume of his unknown political writings from 1919 to 1927 that took the paper's name as its title.

Editorial character: republic, feuilleton and social reportage

The paper positioned itself clearly against the war and its makers. On the fifth anniversary of the declaration of war on Serbia it published a leading article to that effect, and its unsigned obituary of Moriz Benedikt, the editor-in-chief of the Neue Freie Presse who died in March 1920, was a reckoning: the misguided seed of the great liberal paper, it argued, had come up in the World War and the collapse of the Monarchy. A comprehensive feuilleton was the paper's hallmark — theatre criticism alongside the Wiener Symptome, serial novels alongside essays — joined to political reporting committed to the republic, democracy and social reform.

The combination was characteristic of the best Viennese journalism of 1919: the belief that the new republic would be built as much by cultural renewal and social reporting as by parliaments. It was also expensive. A paper with Polgar, Kisch, Kuh and Roth on its pages, printed by a paper concern in a time of paper shortage, had quality in excess of what its market, in an impoverished and shrinking Vienna, could pay for.

Closure on 30 April 1920

On 17 April 1920 Karpeles resigned the editorship; Julius Szeps, who had previously led the Fremden-Blatt itself, took over on an interim basis. At the end of April the paper ceased. Its farewell editorial notice of 30 April 1920 stated that neither the recognition the paper had found nor the warm sympathy of its numerous readership sufficed to continue existing in economically difficult times. The announced interruption of publication, explained by risen operating costs and paper shortage, became the definitive closure.

Der Neue Tag had lasted thirteen months, from 23 March 1919 to 30 April 1920. Karpeles withdrew from the newspaper business afterward and worked in leading positions in his father's transport enterprise in Vienna and Berlin. The writers dispersed: Kisch to his reportage career, Kuh to the cabaret and the feuilletons of other papers, Polgar to eminence and eventual exile, Roth to Berlin and fame. The paper itself entered the archives.

A distinct title: not the later German papers

Reference works disambiguate Der Neue Tag carefully. The Viennese paper of 1919-1920 was not Der Neue Tag of Cologne, not the German occupation newspaper of that name published in Prague during the Second World War, and not the regional Der neue Tag of Weiden in der Oberpfalz in Germany, which still exists. It was also distinct from the many other Viennese near-namesakes of its own moment, such as Der Tag of 1922 to 1930 and Der Wiener Tag of 1930 to 1938. Any citation of Der Neue Tag for the years 1919 or 1920 in a Viennese, literary or Austrian-republican context refers to Karpeles's paper.

What cannot be verified

For a paper so literary, the commercial record is strikingly absent. No verified circulation figure for Der Neue Tag is given in the sources consulted, and this profile states none; its farewell notice's reference to a numerous readership is a claim by the paper itself, not a measurement. Its advertising income, its exact page counts across the run and the full roster of its business management beyond the Elbemühl imprint are not documented in the accessible literature. The contractual independence guarantee for Karpeles is documented as a fact of the foundation; the day-to-day reality of relations between editor and owners across thirteen months is not recoverable in comparable detail, and the profile does not dramatise it.

Legacy and availability today

Der Neue Tag survives in scholarship out of proportion to its thirteen months. The Austrian Academy of Sciences' newspaper documentation records it as title number 0690, succeeding the Fremden-Blatt, with its exact run; the Vienna History Wiki lists it as historical, 23 March 1919 to 30 April 1920; the University of Klagenfurt's project on literary culture of the 1920s gives it a full lexicon entry, quoting its programme and its farewell. Above all, Joseph Roth scholarship has preserved it, because the paper was where Roth became Roth: his more than one hundred contributions, written at twenty-four and twenty-five, are the foundation documents of his journalism.

The paper's historical meaning is that of a brilliant, brief republican experiment: an owner-guaranteed independent editor, a feuilleton of the first rank, a programme of democracy and social reform, published by a paper concern at 30 Heller in a starving city — and extinguished, after thirteen months, by the arithmetic of costs and paper in the spring of 1920.