About Die Stunde

Die Stunde

Die Stunde was a Viennese daily newspaper published in Vienna, Austria, from 2 March 1923 to 13 March 1938. Published by Emmerich Békessy through his Kronos-Verlag, it was described by the German-language Wikipedia as Austria's first boulevard newspaper: the paper that brought the modern tabloid formula — bold, oversized headlines, heavy use of photographs and illustrations, sensation and pace — to the Austrian capital. Edited by Karl Tschuppik, read by between 40,000 and 60,000 buyers at its documented circulation range, and staffed at one point by an eighteen-year-old named Billy Wilder, Die Stunde became famous above all through the long, ferocious campaign that the satirist Karl Kraus waged against Békessy and his papers. Its fifteen years of life exactly spanned the First Austrian Republic, and it ended with the republic itself, in the days of the Anschluss in March 1938.

Emmerich Békessy and the Kronos-Verlag

The paper's publisher, Emmerich Békessy — known in Hungarian as Imre Békessy — was a Hungarian-born press entrepreneur who became the most controversial newspaper proprietor in interwar Vienna. His editorial formula, as press historians describe it, was sensationalism laced with pressure: his papers were accused of threatening members of the public with the publication of incriminating material unless money was paid. Through his Kronos-Verlag he built a small stable of titles, of which Die Stunde, founded on 2 March 1923, was the flagship. Békessy's methods eventually provoked the campaign that destroyed him in Vienna: Karl Kraus, the editor of Die Fackel and the most feared polemicist in the German language, made the exposure and expulsion of Békessy a personal crusade, and Békessy was ultimately forced to give up his papers and leave Vienna.

That notoriety should not obscure what Die Stunde was as a newspaper. It was a genuine publishing innovation in the Austrian market, and its formula — crime, sensation, sport, pictures and big headlines, sold cheaply on the street — permanently changed what Viennese readers expected from a daily paper.

Austria's first boulevard newspaper

Wikipedia DE describes Die Stunde as Austria's first boulevard newspaper, and the description identifies its real historical claim. Vienna before 1923 had great liberal broadsheets, party papers and cheap small-format dailies such as the Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung, but the full boulevard package — the huge headline, the photograph-led page, the illustration, the compressed and dramatised story — arrived as a system with Békessy's paper. The so-called boulevard press became a dominant feature of the early Austrian republic, and Die Stunde was its pace-setter: a paper designed to be bought on impulse, read quickly and talked about, in a city whose older papers were designed to be subscribed to and pondered over coffee.

The paper's name — Die Stunde, The Hour — itself advertised the formula: the news of the hour, the sensation of the moment. Its appearance at midday or for the street trade put it in direct competition for the passer-by's coin rather than the subscriber's loyalty, and its documented circulation of 40,000 to 60,000 copies placed it firmly in the first rank of Vienna's street-sale papers.

Karl Tschuppik and the editorial office

The editor-in-chief of Die Stunde was Karl Tschuppik, a Prague-born journalist and novelist who was one of the most accomplished German-language editors of his generation. That a boulevard paper was edited by a serious literary journalist is characteristic of Békessy's operation, which bought talent wherever it found it. Among the young talent that passed through the paper's office was an eighteen-year-old Billy Wilder, who worked on the staff of Die Stunde before moving to Berlin and then, after 1933, to Hollywood, where he became one of the greatest film directors of the twentieth century. Wilder's Viennese newspaper apprenticeship — chasing stories for Békessy's boulevard daily — formed part of the education of the reporter he later recreated in his films about journalism.

The combination was typical of the paper's world: high literary talent, low editorial scruple, speed, wit and sensation mixed on the same payroll. Die Stunde was at once a school of journalism in which a future Hollywood master learned his trade and a byword, in the writings of Karl Kraus, for everything corrupt in the modern press.

Karl Kraus's campaign against Békessy

No account of Die Stunde is complete without Karl Kraus. From the pages of Die Fackel, Kraus conducted a long campaign against Békessy, documenting and denouncing the publisher's alleged blackmail practices and demanding his expulsion from Vienna. The campaign became one of the famous press wars of the interwar German-speaking world: the solitary satirist, armed with nothing but his own magazine and an unmatched ear for the corruption of language, against the boulevard magnate and his stable of papers. Kraus's campaign succeeded in its object — Békessy was eventually forced to give up his papers and leave Vienna — and it fixed the historical reputation of Die Stunde permanently: the paper is remembered, beyond its own pages, as the principal exhibit in Kraus's indictment of the commercial press.

For historians, the Kraus-Békessy feud is valuable precisely because it was fought in print and preserved in print. It documents, in unusual detail, the business methods of the early boulevard press and the counter-attack of an older, moralising journalism — a conflict between two models of the newspaper that was being played out, less literately, in every European capital.

Vienna's press in the First Republic

Die Stunde belonged to the extraordinarily dense press world of First Republic Vienna. Studies count some 140 newspapers, many short-lived, published in Vienna between 1918 and 1934 alone, and the capital's papers became more important than ever even as their potential readership shrank with the empire's collapse. Party papers, Catholic papers, liberal papers and the new boulevard titles fought for a politically polarised city — Red Vienna under its Social Democratic administration, facing a Christian Social-led federal state. Die Stunde's boulevard formula stood partly outside that party battle: its currency was sensation rather than doctrine, which was itself one of the things its critics held against it.

The final issue, 13 March 1938

Die Stunde appeared from 2 March 1923 until 13 March 1938. Its last issue fell in the very days of the Anschluss: German troops entered Austria on 12 March 1938, and the annexation was proclaimed on 13 March. The paper's fifteen-year run therefore ended with the destruction of the Austrian state whose first republic it had chronicled and scandalised. The fate of its staff and the details of its final days are not documented in the sources consulted for this profile, and no claims are made here about them; what is verified is the closing date, which ties the end of Austria's first boulevard paper to the end of the republic that had made it possible.

Legacy

The legacy of Die Stunde is double. As a format, it founded the Austrian boulevard tradition: the headline-led, picture-led, street-sold daily that has dominated the popular end of the Austrian market ever since, down to the modern Kronen Zeitung and its rivals. As a scandal, it supplied Karl Kraus with his greatest journalistic target and posterity with its sharpest case study of boulevard methods in the 1920s. And as a biographical footnote, it employed the teenage Billy Wilder. Few papers of fifteen years' life have left three such distinct marks on the record — which is why Die Stunde, closed in 1938, still earns its place in any directory of Austrian newspapers.

Sources and the limits of the record

The core facts of this profile — publication by Emmerich Békessy's Kronos-Verlag from 2 March 1923 to 13 March 1938, the editorship of Karl Tschuppik, the circulation range of 40,000 to 60,000, the young Billy Wilder's employment and the paper's standing as Austria's first boulevard newspaper — follow the German-language Wikipedia's account, supported by the wider literature on the Viennese press of the First Republic, in which Békessy appears as the era's short-lived tabloid magnate whose formula was sensationalism and whose downfall Karl Kraus engineered. Details beyond that record, such as the paper's street price across its life, its advertising base or the fate of its archive, are not documented in the sources consulted and have not been reconstructed here. The paper's importance does not depend on them: Die Stunde matters because it changed the form of the Austrian newspaper, because it provoked the most famous press feud in Austrian history, and because its dates, 1923 to 1938, frame the First Republic itself with uncomfortable precision.