About Linzer Zeitung

Linzer Zeitung

The Linzer Zeitung is an Austrian periodical published in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, whose first appearance is dated to 1676. On that dating it is the second-oldest still-published periodical in the world, after the Haarlems Dagblad, and the official print medium with the longest history anywhere in the world. In 1926 the paper, published by the Upper Austrian state government since that period, took its current name, Amtliche Linzer Zeitung, Official Linz Newspaper, with the subtitle from 1931 Amtsblatt für Oberösterreich, Official Gazette for Upper Austria, and the gazette still appears today. The historic Linzer Zeitung began under the printer Hanns Jakob Mayr, who received permission at the end of 1675 to print the news sheets that had until then circulated only in handwriting, and who probably began printing at the start of 1676. The oldest surviving copy is issue number 33, also cited as number 38, of April or May 1677, held by the Upper Austrian State Library. Across three and a half centuries the paper was printed twice weekly with postal news from Vienna, Munich and Frankfurt, became a court newspaper under an imperial privilege from 1694, was restructured in 1814 into a main paper, an official gazette and an advertising intelligence paper, was briefly edited in 1849 by the writer Adalbert Stifter, and passed through a documented succession of Linz printing houses before becoming the province's official gazette.

Before print: handwritten news and the first Linz attempts

The Linzer Zeitung's prehistory shows how hard it was to start a newspaper in a Habsburg provincial capital. The oldest handwritten Neue Zeitung of Upper Austria dates from 1540 and is held in the Freistadt town archive. The printer Johann Planck, who came from Erfurt, received the first printing concession in Upper Austria on 13 February 1615, but the Upper Austrian Estates refused his application to print newspapers on 17 September 1615. The next attempt came from Crispinus Voytlender, who wrote on 16 July 1630 to the town of Enns that the provincial government had permitted him to produce the weekly Ordinari Zeitungen in print; he sent thirty copies for inspection, and three Freistadt payment receipts from 1630 further document the paper. No copies from the following decades survive, a loss attributed to war, poor paper, low documentary interest and small print runs. The Ordinari-Zeitungen of 1630 are the documented predecessors whose tradition the present Amtliche Linzer Zeitung carries on.

1676: Hanns Jakob Mayr begins printing

The continuous history begins with Hanns Jakob Mayr. Mayr migrated from Kempten in the Allgäu to Linz in 1674 and was admitted as a book printer on 14 September of that year, setting up a second printing works in competition with the existing works of Caspar Freyschmid. At the end of 1675 he received permission from the Landeshauptmannschaft, the provincial governorship, to print the information sheets that had until then been handwritten. At the beginning of 1676 Mayr probably began printing the Linzer Zeitung, and 1676 is accordingly now taken as its founding year. The early paper appeared under the title Lintzerisch Extract-Blatl Der Ordinari-Zeitungen, the Linz Extract Sheet of the Ordinary Newspapers, a name that honestly described its method: it extracted the postal news of larger papers, above all the Viennese Ordinari-Zeitungen, selected and summarised the most important events of the world from Vienna, Munich and Frankfurt, added local information for the Upper Austrian readership, and published the result twice a week. The masthead of 1677 makes that dependence visible, presenting the Linz paper as an extract of a more significant Viennese contemporary, tailored for provincial readers.

The oldest surviving copies

The paper's antiquity rests on documents that can still be inspected. The oldest surviving copy is held by the Upper Austrian State Library: the detailed article identifies it as issue number 33 of 24 April 1677, while its section on surviving copies describes the oldest completely preserved sheet as number 38 of 11 May 1677; both descriptions are recorded here, since the reference text gives both, and researchers should check the library catalogue before citing a single number. The 11 May 1677 issue contains news from Vienna dated 9 May, Strasbourg 4 May, Cologne 2 May, Liège and The Hague 30 April, Brussels 29 April and Copenhagen 22 April: roughly two days from Vienna, a week from the Rhine and nearly three weeks from Denmark, a measure of seventeenth-century news speed. Surviving fragments are held in only three archives, and many survive only as book-cover finds, because bookbinders reused old newspapers to make book covers.

Court newspaper under imperial privilege

With the imperial privilege from 1694, and under strict censorship rules, the Linzer Zeitung changed into a Hofzeitung, a court newspaper with official-gazette character. Its mastheads chart that elevation: from 1694 it appeared as the Lintzer Montags- und Freytags Ordinari-Zeitungen with the Latin formula of special grace and privilege of His Imperial Majesty, and eighteenth-century variants spelled out the privilege of the Roman Imperial, Royal Hungarian and Bohemian Apostolic Majesty. The privilege was both an honour and a subjection: it raised the paper above unprivileged competitors and bound it to imperial censorship. Around the turn of 1701 the Steyr printer Franz Zachäus Auinger opened Linz's third printing works and acquired at the same time the right to produce the Linzer Zeitung; the Auinger printing house then published the paper continuously for 112 years, under Franz Zachäus Auinger, Johann Adam Auinger and Franz Xaver Auinger, one of the longest printer-paper relationships in Austrian press history. The documented succession of publishers, from Mayr's widow and Johann Rädlmayr in the seventeenth century through the Auingers and later houses, is one of the paper's best-preserved records.

The nineteenth century: new name, three parts and Adalbert Stifter

In 1803 the newspaper received the new name Linzer Zeitung, and in 1814 a new structure of three parts that defined the mature paper: the main paper reported events at home and abroad, the second part, the Amtsblatt, served for the publication of laws and ordinances of the provincial government, and the third part, the Intelligenzblatt, carried economic and private advertisements. In 1815 Friedrich Emanuel Eurich received a fifth printing licence for Linz, over the protest of the established printers, which the authorities answered by arguing that after the incorporation of the Innviertel Upper Austria could well support a fifth works and that Eurich had behaved excellently during the French wars; the Eurich printing house published the Linzer Zeitung for sixty-five years in total. The paper's encounter with war appears in its masthead: after the Battle of Ebelsberg on 3 May 1809 it paused briefly, and the next issue, on 22 May, appeared with a changed subtitle, by approbation of the Napoleonic governor instead of the Emperor, praising Napoleon's victories in dictated reports. Its most famous editor came after the 1848 revolution: Adalbert Stifter, the great Austrian prose writer, who had already written political leading articles for it, took over the editorship briefly, from spring to October 1849, as press officer of the provincial governor, and remained a freelance contributor until his death.

Mastheads as a political barometer

Few newspapers wear their history as openly as this one. The documented masthead sequence runs from the Ordinari Zeitungen of 1630 and the privileged forms of 1694 to 1772, to Linzer-Zeitung in 1803, the Napoleonic approbation of 1809, the restored imperial-royal privilege of 1821, and plain Linzer-Zeitung again from 1860, when the privilege reference was dropped. The twentieth century added Amtliche Linzer Zeitung in 1927, the subtitle Amtsblatt für Oberösterreich in 1931, Amtsblatt für Oberdonau from August 1938, when the Nazi regime renamed the province, Öffentlicher Anzeiger from May 1940, Oberösterreichisches Amtsblatt in 1945, and, since 1946, Amtliche Linzer Zeitung. Amtsblatt für Oberösterreich, the masthead that has since remained unchanged the longest in its nearly 400-year history. Each change is a dated trace of a change of regime or censorship.

From newspaper to official gazette, 1926 onwards

In 1926 the paper became the official gazette of the Upper Austrian provincial government under the name Amtliche Linzer Zeitung; the publishing passed to the printing works of the Office of the Upper Austrian Provincial Government, where it remained. Although it is a gazette for the whole Land of Upper Austria, the traditional title was kept, and to avoid misunderstanding the addition Amtsblatt für Oberösterreich was attached in 1931. A separate reference entry on the Amtliche Linzer Zeitung records that it appears in Linz every fourteen days, that its media owner is the Land of Upper Austria and its publisher the Office of the Provincial Government, with first-publication dates given as 1676, 1924 and 1927 for its successive forms. The gazette's article archive covers, among other spans, 1928 to 1938 and 1945 to 1947. The transformation completed a circle: a paper that had begun by extracting other papers' news under official permission ended as the state's own publication, valued not for commentary but for the legal authority of what it printed, including the public announcements that Austrian law required to be published in official gazettes.

Printers and publishers across the centuries

The paper's documented line of printers and publishers is a history of the Linz printing trade in miniature, running from Voytlender, Paltauf and the Kürner family among the first Linz printers, through Mayr and his widow, Rädlmayr and the three Auingers, to Schlesinger, the Eurich family, Feichtingers Erben, Mareis, the Linzer Zentraldruckerei and the Catholic Press Association of the Diocese of Linz, before the provincial government's own works took over in 1926. One melancholy detail survives: Ferdinand Krackowitzer, first director of the Upper Austrian State Archive, recorded that Anton Ferdinand Ritter von Schwabenau, district commissioner and museum association president from 1863 to 1869, even after retiring sent extremely rare old volumes of the Linzer Zeitung to the paper mill, a reminder that its archival survival owes as much to luck as to care.

How old is it, and how does it rank?

The paper's own scholars have asked the question in print: Peter Baumgartner's study is titled 1772, 1630 or 1667? How old is the Linzer Zeitung?, and the provincial government marked 350 years with a festschrift in 1980 titled Das älteste Periodikum der Welt. The current scholarly dating takes 1676, the start of Mayr's continuous printing, as the founding year, while acknowledging the 1630 Voytlender paper as a documented predecessor whose copies do not survive. On that dating the rankings are precise: second-oldest still-published periodical in the world after the Haarlems Dagblad, whose weekly ancestor began in 1656, and the world's longest-running official print medium. It is not the oldest daily, a distinction assigned to the Wiener Zeitung, founded in 1703, nor the oldest newspaper ever printed, the Strasbourg Relation of 1605, distinctions this profile keeps separate because the Linzer Zeitung's claim needs no exaggeration.

Assessment and limits of the record

The Linzer Zeitung is the rare directory entry whose superlatives are documented rather than promotional. Its founding circumstances, its oldest surviving issues and their contents, its privilege and censorship history, its three-part structure, its Stifter editorship, its masthead sequence and its complete printer succession are all recorded in the reference literature and in the Upper Austrian scholarship the paper itself inspired, including a Vienna doctoral dissertation on its history from 1630 to 1952. The seed notice for this profile described the oldest copy as issue number 33 of 24 April 1677 held by the Upper Austrian State Library; the detailed reference text also describes the oldest completely preserved sheet as number 38 of 11 May 1677, and both statements have been carried into this profile openly rather than silently choosing one. What cannot be verified here includes circulation at any period, the names of most editors besides Stifter, and the paper's finances, and none are invented. As the Amtliche Linzer Zeitung, the title continues to appear, carrying a line of print that began when Linz news still arrived by post horse from Vienna, Munich and Frankfurt.