About Das Kleine Blatt

Das Kleine Blatt

Das Kleine Blatt, The Little Paper, was a German-language newspaper published in Vienna from 1 March 1927 to 26 June 1971, with long interruptions and changes of character forced on it by Austria's dictatorships. It began as the Social Democratic Workers' Party's popular small-format daily: an entertaining, illustrated, cartoon-rich paper, modelled on the British penny press, designed to carry social democracy indirectly to readers who would never open the party's theoretical daily, the Arbeiter-Zeitung. It succeeded brilliantly, selling close to 136,000 copies in its first year and reaching far more women workers than any other party publication. Banned in 1934, revived as a state workers' paper, Nazified in 1938, merged out of existence in 1944, it returned in 1947 as the Socialist Party's weekly and lived on in that quieter form until 1971.

The paper holds two distinctions in Austrian cultural history. From 1930 it carried Ladislaus Kmoch's Tobias Seicherl, Austria's first daily comic strip. And its pre-1934 cartoonist Paul Humpoletz made its front pages a daily act of resistance to Nazism, until the Anschluss forced him to flee. Few Austrian newspapers contain, in one title, so complete a record of the century's violence done to a free press, and of the uses dictatorships found for a popular paper once they had captured it.

Founding in 1927: The Social Democrats' Penny Press

The first issue of Das Kleine Blatt appeared on 1 March 1927. It was started as a daily newspaper in a small format, which it kept until 1944, and it was published by Vorwärts, the publishing company of the Social Democratic Workers' Party. Its founding editor-in-chief was Julius Braunthal, the party's historian and publicist, and its editors included Johann Hirsch and Karl Ausch. The paper was inspired by the British penny press: cheap, lively, visual and entertainment-led.

The first issue made the intention visible. It carried no editorial; instead, its cover page carried an illustration. The party that produced the Arbeiter-Zeitung, regarded across the Socialist International as a model of serious party journalism, deliberately built a second paper that led with pictures, stories, local news, court reports and cartoons, and smuggled its politics in through entertainment. Researchers describe the goal precisely: to make indirect propaganda for social democracy with entertaining contributions, rather than to instruct the already convinced.

Staff, Cartoons and Tobias Seicherl

The paper was a training ground. Many inexperienced young journalists were employed at Das Kleine Blatt, among them Karl Hans Sailer, Marianne Pollak, Jakob Meth, Ludwig Wagner and Walter Süss, who learned the trade on a popular daily before moving through the party press. Its early pages also carried a sports supplement, part of its bid for the whole of a working family's reading time.

Its main political cartoonist was Paul Humpoletz, who contributed a regular cartoon strip as well as single front-page cartoons. Humpoletz was virulently anti-Nazi and fought antisemitism in his drawings. That stance became dangerous in March 1938, when the Anschluss forced him to flee Vienna for Prague. The paper he left behind would soon publish antisemitic cartoons of its own under its new masters, one of the bitterest reversals in the file of any Austrian newspaper.

From 1930 the paper published daily Ladislaus Kmoch's comic character Tobias Seicherl, a hapless Viennese everyman whose adventures made the paper the home of Austria's first daily comic strip. Seicherl became a Viennese institution in his own right, proof that the party's popular experiment had created genuine popular culture and not merely a distribution channel for doctrine.

Readers: The Paper the Women Workers Read

The experiment worked on a scale the party's other papers never approached. In its first year Das Kleine Blatt sold nearly 136,000 copies. The Austria-Forum encyclopedia records a circulation of 165,000 in 1930; English reference summaries give 200,000 copies in 1934, on the eve of its banning. Even allowing for the different bases of those figures, the order of magnitude is clear: this was one of Vienna's largest dailies, and by far the Social Democrats' largest.

A study carried out in the 1930s among 1,320 Viennese female factory workers found that 48.2 percent of them read Das Kleine Blatt, against 28.8 percent for the Arbeiter-Zeitung and 21.4 percent for the party's women's paper Die Unzufriedene. Historians of women's suffrage and socialist culture cite the finding constantly, because it captures the paper's real constituency: working women, courted by every party in Red Vienna, who chose the Little Paper over the movement's own women's organ by more than two to one.

Censorship, Banning and the 1934 Revival

From March 1933, Das Kleine Blatt and other Austrian publications were subject to the state censorship of the Dollfuß government, which suspended parliament that month and ruled by emergency decree. The paper's defining stand in those years was its ardent criticism of the Nazis, whom it named the biggest enemy of the Austrian working class. Its reward from its own government was suppression anyway: when the Social Democrats rose in the February fighting of 1934 and were crushed, the paper was banned on 12 February 1934, and Julius Braunthal left it.

Two weeks later, on 28 February 1934, the paper was revived, but as a different creature: a state-backed newspaper for workers advocating the principles of the corporative state, the official ideology of the Austrofascist regime that had just destroyed its owners. The name, the format and much of the popular apparatus survived; the politics were inverted. The Austria-Forum entry summarises the sequence drily: founded by the Social Democrats, suspended from 12 to 27 February 1934, and from 28 February published as a working-class newspaper of the corporative state. Circulation in 1935, about 90,000 copies, registered the loss of its original public.

Bringing Into Line, 1938 to 1944

In March 1938 the newspaper was brought into line with the National Socialist state, in the standard phrase of the Austrian reference works. The Social Democratic popular paper that had called the Nazis the working class's greatest enemy now supported the National Socialists, and in this period it featured antisemitic cartoons, the precise genre its own exiled cartoonist Humpoletz had used against antisemitism. The capture of Das Kleine Blatt is a textbook case of Gleichschaltung applied to a mass paper: keep the brand, the format and the readers; replace the politics and the people.

The end of the wartime paper came on 31 August 1944, when it was merged with other shrunken titles into the Kleine Wiener Kriegszeitung, the Little Viennese War Newspaper, the regime's consolidated small-format paper for a capital running out of newsprint. It appeared under that title until 6 April 1945, on the eve of Vienna's fall. The small format the Social Democrats had pioneered in 1927 thus ended its daily life as a Nazi war sheet, a fate its founders could not have imagined and its historians do not let readers forget.

Post-War Weekly and Final Closure in 1971

After a two-year hiatus, the paper was restarted with its original title on 14 June 1947, now as the weekly newspaper of the Social Democratic Party, the SPÖ. The post-war Das Kleine Blatt never attempted to recover its daily mass role: post-war Vienna belonged, in the popular market, to the refounded Kronen Zeitung after 1959 and to the occupation-born papers, and the SPÖ's own daily remained the Arbeiter-Zeitung. The weekly Little Paper served the party's faithful in a modest, familiar form.

It ceased publication on 26 June 1971, closing a title that had existed, in its three lives, for forty-four years. The date is worth stating precisely, because short directory summaries sometimes give 12 June 1971; both the English reference record and the Austria-Forum encyclopedia give 26 June 1971 as the discontinuation date, and this profile follows them. The closure came in the Kreisky era's first years, as the SPÖ modernised its communications and the economics of party weeklies collapsed across Austria.

The Companion It Provoked: Das Kleine Volksblatt

The Little Paper's success forced an imitation that clarifies its impact. On 27 January 1929 the Christian Social Party founded Das Kleine Volksblatt, the Little People's Paper, explicitly as the counterpart to the SPÖ's Kleines Blatt: the same small format, the same popular recipe, for the Catholic camp. The two little papers fought the Lager war of the First Republic in tabloid form until both were coordinated in 1938 and merged into the same war paper in 1944.

After 1945 the Volksblatt was refounded as the ÖVP's central organ and later became the broadsheet Volksblatt, closing in 1970, a year before its socialist model. The paired history, two party little papers founded two years apart, captured together, and closed a year apart, is one of the neatest illustrations in Austrian press history of how completely the party-press system rose and fell as a single structure.

Archive and Research Value

Das Kleine Blatt is unusually well served by modern scholarship. Alexander Potyka's monograph on the paper appeared in 1989, the Red Vienna reference project documents its history in detail, and the University of Klagenfurt's literary-culture project on the 1920s and the University of Graz's archive for the history of sociology both maintain researched entries on it. Its cartoons, its comic strip and its readership data make it a standard source for the cultural history of Red Vienna, for the history of comics in Austria, and for the study of how socialist parties used entertainment media.

Its darker chapters are equally documented, which is to the credit of Austrian press historiography: the 1934 inversion, the Nazi-period antisemitic cartoons and the 1944 merger are recorded in the standard references, not passed over. A researcher can therefore follow one small-format title through every regime Austria had between 1927 and 1971, and watch a newspaper's identity being kept, stolen and partially restored in turn.

Place in Austrian Press History

Das Kleine Blatt stands in Austrian press history as the Social Democratic answer to the commercial tabloid: proof that a party could beat the boulevard at its own game, with pictures, comics and court news, and reach the readers, above all working women, whom doctrine never reached. It was the direct model for the Christian Socials' Kleine Volksblatt, the first home of the Austrian daily comic strip, and a case study, in 1934 and 1938, of what authoritarian and totalitarian regimes do with a popular paper they capture.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these. Das Kleine Blatt was a German-language newspaper published in Vienna by the Social Democratic publishing house Vorwärts, founded with a first issue on 1 March 1927 under founding editor Julius Braunthal; it sold nearly 136,000 copies in its first year; it carried Austria's first daily comic strip, Tobias Seicherl, from 1930; it was banned on 12 February 1934 and revived a fortnight later as a corporative-state workers' paper; it was coordinated with the Nazi state in 1938 and merged into the Kleine Wiener Kriegszeitung on 31 August 1944; it was re-established as an SPÖ weekly on 14 June 1947; and it ceased publication on 26 June 1971. It is a closed newspaper, recorded here in the past tense.