About Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung

Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung

The Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung, usually shortened to DÖTZ, was a German-language daily newspaper published in Vienna, Austria, from 1 April 1921 until 1933. It was the final title in a long lineage of strongly nationalist and antisemitic Viennese newspapers, and in its last years it served as the newspaper organ of the German-Austrian National Socialists. Because the paper ceased publication more than ninety years ago, its story was entirely a story of the late Habsburg Monarchy and the First Austrian Republic: of the collapse of an empire, of the campaign for union between German-speaking Austria and the German Reich, and of the radicalisation of Vienna's German-national press in the years before authoritarian rule and, later, annexation. This profile records what can be verified about the newspaper from published press histories and reference works, and it states openly where the surviving record is thin.

Origins in the Ostdeutsche Rundschau

The Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung did not begin as a new foundation in 1921. It stood, as German-language Wikipedia summarising the standard press histories puts it, at the end of a series of strongly national and antisemitic papers. Its predecessor was the Ostdeutsche Rundschau, founded in 1890 by Karl Hermann Wolf as a weekly newspaper. Wolf was a leading figure in the German-national movement in the Habsburg lands, and his paper gave that movement a Viennese voice at a time when the Monarchy's German-speaking liberals were losing ground to newer mass movements, including the Christian Socials, the Social Democrats and the pan-German current associated with Georg von Schönerer.

In 1903 the Ostdeutsche Rundschau became a daily newspaper under the new title Neues Deutsches Tagblatt. In 1904 it was renamed Deutsches Tagblatt, and from 1908 it carried its original name, Ostdeutsche Rundschau, once again. These repeated changes of title were not unusual in the Viennese press of the period, where papers were frequently renamed, merged or relaunched as owners, finances and political alignments shifted. What remained constant through the changes was the paper's place in the German-national camp and its base in Vienna, the imperial capital.

From Monarchy to Republic: the renaming chain of 1920-1921

The defeat of Austria-Hungary in the First World War and the proclamation of the Republic of German-Austria in November 1918 transformed the political setting in which the paper operated. The new state's very name expressed the aspiration, shared across much of its political spectrum at the time, to join the German Republic, an aspiration the victorious powers forbade in the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919. The newspaper's titles in these years tracked that upheaval closely.

From 1920 the paper appeared as the Wiener deutsche Tageszeitung. From 8 August 1920 to 31 March 1921 it was published under the title Deutsche Tageszeitung, a title it shared, confusingly, with an unrelated Berlin newspaper of the same name, from which reference works are careful to distinguish it. On 1 April 1921 it was finally renamed Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung, the name under which it appeared for the remaining twelve years of its life. The compound Deutschösterreichisch itself was a political statement: it asserted the German character of the Austrian republic whose independent existence the peace settlement had imposed.

Publisher: the Alldeutsche Vereinigung consortium

The publisher of the Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung was a consortium of the Alldeutsche Vereinigung, the Pan-German association, led by Georg von Schönerer and Heinrich Claß. Schönerer, who died in 1921, the year the DÖTZ title was adopted, had been the formative figure of pan-German politics in Austria, combining German nationalism with a virulent antisemitism and hostility to the Habsburg dynasty and the Catholic Church. Claß led the Pan-German League in the German Reich. That the Viennese daily was in the hands of this consortium placed it institutionally inside the pan-German movement rather than in the camp of the larger, more electorally successful Greater German People's Party, although its sympathies and readership overlapped with that milieu.

In its first years the newspaper carried in its masthead the slogan associated with Schönerer, Alldeutschland die Hoffnung, Großdeutschland das Ziel — All-Germany the hope, Greater Germany the goal. The slogan summed up the paper's founding programme after the First World War: the Anschluss, the union of German-Austria with the republican German Reich, presented not as one policy among others but as the organising hope of its politics.

Editorial line: nationalism, racism and antisemitism

Press historians describe the editorial line of the Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung as shaped by the extremely pronounced nationalism of its milieu, the Deutschtum or Germanhood ideology, combined with pronounced racism and with Vienna's long tradition of hostility to Jews. Two documented episodes illustrate the character of that line without the need for embellishment. In October 1925, according to the reference literature, the paper demanded the creation of a Judenkataster, a register of Jews, for the Austrian Federal Army. In 1928 it described the Viennese appearance of the dancer and singer Josephine Baker as a Negerskandal, a racialised scandal, in terms that the historical literature cites as evidence of its racist campaigning.

Readers approaching the paper today through the digitised copies held by the Austrian National Library therefore encounter a historical source of a particular kind. It documents, in its own words, the ideology of the radical German-national fringe in interwar Vienna, and historians of antisemitism, including the standard German handbook on the subject, cite it in that capacity. Its value as a source lies in what it reveals about its publishers and its milieu, and any account of it has to name that editorial character plainly, as the reference works do.

The sale to the NSDAP in 1927

The decisive change of ownership came in 1927. In that year both the newspaper itself and the attached business, including its printing plant, were sold to the German NSDAP. The party did not, at first, appear openly as the owner; it remained in the background while the paper continued to appear under its established name and management forms. The concealed purchase was characteristic of the Austrian National Socialists' press strategy in the late 1920s, when the movement was still small, divided and competing for the German-national readership against older papers and parties.

By the end of its existence, the Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung had become, in the words of the reference accounts, the newspaper organ of the German-Austrian National Socialists. The trajectory from Schönerer's pan-German consortium to concealed Nazi ownership traces, in the history of a single title, the broader takeover of Austria's völkisch press milieu by National Socialism between the mid-1920s and 1933.

The feuilleton: Jelusich, Doderer and the culture pages

Alongside its politics, the paper maintained a culture section, the feuilleton, which was a standard and prestigious component of Viennese daily newspapers. From 1923 to 1933 the feuilleton editor was Mirko Jelusich, who remained in the post for the whole decade until the paper's end. Jelusich later became a well-known historical novelist in the German-national and National Socialist cultural world.

The culture pages were partly shaped, as the reference literature notes, by authors who later became prominent. Among them was the young Heimito von Doderer, who went on to become one of Austria's major twentieth-century novelists, author of Die Strudlhofstiege and Die Dämonen. Also named in connection with the paper's cultural section are Gerhard Aichinger, who wrote as Gerhard Aick and later became a youth-book author, and the publicist Kurt Ziesel. The presence of such names is a reminder that interwar Vienna's literary careers often began inside newspapers whose political lines their young contributors did not necessarily share, or did not yet have the standing to refuse. The verified record supports the fact of these contributions; it does not support turning the DÖTZ feuilleton into a literary glory it never claimed for itself.

Vienna setting and the First Republic press landscape

The Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung was one of many Viennese dailies competing in the First Republic's crowded and fiercely partisan press market. Vienna's newspapers of the 1920s ranged from the Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung and the Christian Social Reichspost to liberal titles surviving from the Monarchy and a growing boulevard press. Party and movement papers depended on loyal readerships, subsidies and printing businesses, and titles changed hands as movements rose and fell.

Within that landscape the DÖTZ occupied the radical German-national niche. Its Anschluss slogan spoke to readers who regarded the Austrian republic as an unfinished fragment of a German nation-state. When, in the early 1930s, the Austrian NSDAP grew rapidly and then engaged in a campaign of terror against the Austrian state, the paper's role as the movement's organ tied its fate to that confrontation.

Final years and closure in 1933

The newspaper ceased publication in 1933. The Viennese newspaper listings of the City of Vienna's history wiki give its run under the DÖTZ title as 1 April 1921 to 22 July 1933. The year 1933 was the turning point of the First Republic: in March Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß shut down parliament and began authoritarian rule, and in June the Austrian government banned the NSDAP after a wave of Nazi attacks. A newspaper that by then was the organ of the Austrian National Socialists, owned since 1927 by the German party behind a concealed purchase, could not continue in that environment, and no revival under the title took place. When Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938, the DÖTZ had already been closed for five years, and the press system that followed was the controlled press of the Nazi state, not a continuation of the First Republic's movement papers.

What cannot be verified

Several things a modern directory might wish to state about the Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung cannot be verified from the accessible reference record, and this profile does not invent them. No reliable circulation figures for the paper are given in the sources consulted, so none are stated here. The names of its day-to-day editors-in-chief across the whole run, beyond the documented feuilleton editorship of Mirko Jelusich from 1923 to 1933, are not consistently recorded in the readily available literature. Precise details of its pricing, page counts and distribution beyond Vienna are likewise not documented in the sources used for this profile. Where figures or names of that kind appear elsewhere without a cited source, they should be treated with caution.

Legacy and availability today

The Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung survives as a research source. Digitised editions are available through ANNO, the Austrian National Library's portal for historical Austrian newspapers, where the paper can be consulted under its title for the years of its run. The standard documentation of Viennese daily newspapers edited by Gabriele Melischek and Josef Seethaler covers the paper for the period 1918 to 1938, and Kurt Paupié's handbook of Austrian press history treats it for the earlier period of its lineage. Wolfgang Benz's handbook on antisemitism also cites the paper in documenting the ideology of its milieu.

Its historical significance is therefore documentary rather than celebratory. The DÖTZ was the last title of a lineage begun by Karl Hermann Wolf's Ostdeutsche Rundschau in 1890, renamed through the collapse of the Monarchy, published by Schönerer and Claß's Pan-German consortium, sold secretly to the NSDAP in 1927, and closed in 1933 as Austria's authoritarian turn and the banning of the Nazi movement ended the world that had sustained it. Kept distinct from other Viennese titles of similar name, and read in past tense as the closed and disreputable movement paper it was, it remains a primary source for historians of interwar Austrian nationalism, antisemitism and press politics.