About Dornbirner Gemeindeblatt

Dornbirner Gemeindeblatt

The Dornbirner Gemeindeblatt was the municipal paper of the city of Dornbirn in Vorarlberg, Austria, published by the city from Sunday, 2 January 1870. It was the first Gemeindeblatt, or municipal gazette, to appear in Vorarlberg, and it remained the largest-circulation municipal paper in the province. Its original subtitle was Organ für alle gemeindeamtlichen Kundmachungen, Organ for All Municipal Official Announcements, later Amts- und Anzeigenblatt, Official and Advertising Paper, but from the beginning it was also a bulletin for the whole of community life in Dornbirn, and businesses advertised in it. The paper's origin was unusually dramatic: it was created to replace the town crier, whose Sunday announcements from the steps of the Rotes Haus had become the flashpoint of a conflict between the liberal municipal administration and the parish priest, complete with disrupted proclamations by women praying the rosary aloud. The Gemeindeblatt appeared continuously, apart from a suspension during the National Socialist period from 1939 to 1945, grew from 470 copies and about 18 pages in the nineteenth century to roughly 8,000 to 9,000 copies and 70 to 80 pages, and kept its original name without interruption until, with issue 11/2026 of 13 March 2026, it was renamed Stadtblatt.

Before the paper: the town crier of Dornbirn

Until the Gemeindeblatt appeared, official news in the market town of Dornbirn was proclaimed by a town crier, the Usschaellar in Dornbirn dialect, from Ausscheller, who announced it after Sunday worship from the steps of the Rotes Haus, the Red House, then the Gasthof Engel inn. Dornbirn was still a market community, not yet the industrial city it would become with the textile boom of the late nineteenth century, and oral proclamation to a gathered congregation was a rational system for a community of that scale. The system's weakness was that it depended on a place, a moment and a hearing, and in the autumn of 1869 all three became contested. The story of the Gemeindeblatt's founding, retold in Hans Nägele's account of how the first municipal paper in Vorarlberg came into being, is one of the best-documented newspaper foundings in Austrian local history, precisely because the quarrel that caused it generated protests, warnings and council minutes.

The quarrel of 1869 and the founding decision

The immediate cause was a dispute between the municipal office and the liberal forces in Dornbirn around Mayor Johann Georg Waibel, on one side, and the parish priest of Dornbirn-St. Martin, on the other, over the place of the public proclamation. In October 1869 the proclamation place was moved from the Rotes Haus to the former cemetery by the church, a cemetery that had been closed in 1842 and planted with trees, where in 1854 the priest had erected a mission cross without the municipality's permission. The priest held that moving the crier to that place violated the rights of the church, although the ground itself belonged to the municipality. On 31 October 1869 the first public proclamation at the new place, by the municipal clerk Feuerstein, was disrupted by fifty to sixty women praying the rosary aloud, so that the proclamation was made impossible. The municipality published notices warning against disturbing the reading and threatening punishments, but the next proclamation was again disrupted by forty to fifty women praying loudly, after the platform specially built for the crier had been destroyed by unknown persons. The municipal council moved the proclamation back to the old place at the Rotes Haus and resolved on 10 November 1869 to publish, from New Year 1870, a written local gazette issued by the town of Dornbirn, which would replace the function of the crier.

The first issue of 2 January 1870

On Sunday, 2 January 1870, the first issue of the Dornbirner Gemeindeblatt, Organ für alle gemeindeamtlichen Kundmachungen, appeared, in an edition of 470 copies. The former town crier became the paper's editor, a neat symbol of the transition from voice to print. The idea of an official municipal paper replacing the crier was soon taken up by other municipalities in Vorarlberg, according to Nägele's account, which makes Dornbirn the pioneer of the Gemeindeblatt form in the province. Feldkirch had taken a different route a few years earlier, with a private independent weekly carrying official announcements from 1866; Dornbirn's innovation was a paper published by the municipality itself. The Gemeindeblatt kept its founding name without a break from 1870 onwards, an unusual stability of title in a century when Austrian papers renamed themselves constantly, and its subtitle evolved only from the founding formula to the modern Amts- und Anzeigenblatt. In the nineteenth century the paper averaged about eighteen pages per issue, already substantial for a municipal gazette, because official announcements were joined from the start by community reporting and commercial advertising.

Dornbirn, the town behind the paper

Dornbirn's growth explains the Gemeindeblatt's growth. First mentioned in 895 as Torrinpuirron, the settlement of Torro, the town bought its freedom from the Counts of Ems in 1771, the celebrated Loskauf celebrated in local memory, and in the late nineteenth century the flourishing textile industry made it the largest municipality between the Alpine Rhine and the Arlberg. Today it is the most populous municipality in Vorarlberg and the tenth-largest city in Austria, an economic centre for the whole province, seat of the district administration and of the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences, founded in the 1990s. A municipal paper serving such a town was never a parish notice sheet: it was the official channel of a self-confident industrial community whose council, schools, clubs, churches and firms generated a large volume of announcements. The paper's present scale, about 70 to 80 pages per issue and a circulation of roughly 8,000 to 9,000 copies as recorded by the city, reflects that municipal weight. Those figures are the documented modern scale given in the reference sources, not audited press statistics, and readers should treat them as the city's own recorded orders of magnitude.

Printing history

The Gemeindeblatt was printed from 1870 by the brothers Franz Anton and Daniel Feurstein, then by the Druckerei Höfle, and from 1987 by the Vorarlberger Verlagsanstalt. That short list covers more than a century and a half of production and underlines how stable the paper's arrangements were compared with the ownership churn of commercial newspapers. The publisher throughout was the municipality, today the Amt der Stadt Dornbirn, the Office of the City of Dornbirn, which remains the paper's Herausgeberin. Distribution in the modern city has faced the mundane problems of any free or subscription municipal paper: the city has explained that households with a no-advertising sticker on the letterbox do not receive the Gemeindeblatt, that the delivery area of the distributor does not cover every outlying district such as Ebnit and Kehlegg, that spare copies are held at Dornbirn kiosks, and that the paper can be downloaded digitally from the city's homepage. Those documented details, from the city's own public information, show the Gemeindeblatt functioning in the twenty-first century as one channel among several, alongside the city's website, social media accounts and newsletter, rather than as the sole voice it was in 1870.

The National Socialist gap, 1939 to 1945

The Gemeindeblatt did not appear during the period of National Socialist dictatorship from 1939 to 1945. The reference record states the suspension plainly and does not elaborate a specific reason, and this profile does not invent one. The gap began the year after Austria's annexation, when municipal publications across the Reich were co-ordinated, suspended or folded into the regime's press structures, and it lasted to the end of the Second World War. The paper's resumption after 1945 restored the pre-1938 pattern of a city-published gazette. The interruption is the only break in an otherwise continuous run from 1870, and it is part of why the paper's history is usually told in two spans, the long nineteenth and early twentieth century of print replacing the crier, and the post-war municipal paper of the Second Republic. Researchers using digitised runs should expect the missing war years and should not mistake the gap for a cataloguing error.

Character and content

The Gemeindeblatt was always more than its subtitle promised. It was an official organ for municipal announcements, and it was at the same time a Mitteilungsblatt, a bulletin for community life in Dornbirn, in which businesses placed advertisements. In practice that meant council and administration notices, public warnings and tenders, church and school information, association news, family announcements and commercial advertising, the full printed fabric of a town's week. The city's modern description of its task, to inform the population continuously and as comprehensively as possible about events in Dornbirn, states the same mission in contemporary language. Digitised issues of the Gemeindeblatt are available through the text portal of the Vorarlberg State Library, and the city's archive of issues from 2013 onwards is held on the city's website, so the paper is unusually accessible for a municipal gazette. Its longevity and completeness make it a first-rank source for Dornbirn social history: historians of the town, such as the contributors to the Dornbirner Schriften series of the city archive, have used its announcements to reconstruct everything from council politics to wartime experience.

The renaming to Stadtblatt in 2026

With issue 11/2026 of 13 March 2026, the name Gemeindeblatt was changed to Stadtblatt. The change is documented by the issue itself and by the city's published advertising and subscription tariffs for 2026, which are issued under the Stadtblatt name with a cover price shown of 1.60 euros. The renaming, after 156 years, is best read as a description catching up with reality: Dornbirn has long been a city, the largest in Vorarlberg, and Stadtblatt, city paper, says what Gemeindeblatt, municipal paper, said in the language of 1870. The institution itself was continuous: same publisher, the city; same function, official announcements and community information; same place in the province, the first and largest-circulation municipal paper in Vorarlberg under its old name. Profiles and catalogues will carry both names for years, and archive searches for the paper after March 2026 should be made under Stadtblatt as well as under the historic title under which this profile is filed.

Assessment

The Dornbirner Gemeindeblatt is a model case of how a newspaper can be born from a quarrel about something else entirely, in this case where a man was allowed to stand and read out the council's notices after Mass. Its founders solved a problem of authority with a technology, print, and the solution proved so durable that it defined municipal communication in Vorarlberg and was imitated across the province. The verified record is rich for a local paper: the crier system it replaced, the disturbances of October and November 1869, the council decision of 10 November 1869, the first issue's date and print run, the printers across three centuries, the wartime gap, the modern page counts and circulation range, and the 2026 renaming are all documented. What this profile does not claim, because the sources do not support it, are audited circulation series, named editors beyond the founding crier-editor, or a detailed account of the paper's content decade by decade. Within those limits, the Gemeindeblatt stands as one of Austria's most successful municipal newspapers, a paper that began with 470 copies replacing a shouted announcement and grew with its city into the largest Gemeindeblatt in its province.