About Express

Express

Express was a German-language Viennese daily newspaper published from 25 or 26 March 1958 to 29 April 1971. It emerged from the Bildtelegraf at the end of the famous Wiener Zeitungskrieg, the Vienna newspaper war of the 1950s, and was produced by the same newsroom. Founded by the publisher Fritz Molden and the journalist Gerd Bacher, at first independent, it was owned from December 1960 by the Austrian Socialist Party, the SPÖ, and became a leading post-war boulevard title in Vienna during the newspaper wars of the 1950s and 1960s. In December 1970 it was taken over by Kurt Falk and Hans Dichand, and on 29 April 1971 it was merged into the Neue Kronen Zeitung. Its thirteen years captured the most turbulent and creative period of competition in the Viennese popular press.

The Vienna newspaper war and the Bildtelegraf

Express cannot be understood without the Zeitungskrieg, the newspaper war that consumed Vienna's popular press in the 1950s. The Molden publishing circle around Ernst Molden, founder of the refounded Die Presse, and his son Fritz Molden, publisher of Die Presse, the Wochenpresse and the illustrated Bildtelegraf, fought a circulation and price war with rival Viennese popular papers for the boulevard readership of the capital. The Bildtelegraf, the Molden house's picture paper, stood at the centre of that fight. When the war ended, the Bildtelegraf's operation was transformed: on 25 March 1958, according to the Wien Geschichte Wiki, Express emerged from it, produced by the same newsroom. The Austria-Forum encyclopedia gives 26 March 1958 as the starting date of the Vienna tabloid. The one-day discrepancy is preserved in the sources and is noted here rather than resolved by invention. What is agreed is that Express was the peace settlement and continuation, in daily form, of the Bildtelegraf enterprise.

Fritz Molden and Gerd Bacher

The founders named in the Austria-Forum record are Fritz Molden and Gerd Bacher. Molden, born in Vienna on 8 April 1924, had been a member of the Austrian resistance in 1944 and 1945, then editor, publishing director and finally publisher of Die Presse, the Wochenpresse and Express, and until 1958 of the Bildtelegraf. He was the most entrepreneurial Austrian publisher of his generation, later founding the Fritz Molden Verlag book house in 1965. Bacher became one of Austria's best-known broadcast journalists, later director-general of the ORF. The pairing was characteristic of the early Express: a publisher from the great Molden newspaper family joined to a sharp news journalist, producing a boulevard paper that was livelier and more modern in tone than the staid party dailies with which it competed for Viennese readers.

A boulevard paper in a party-press city

Vienna in 1958 still read along camp lines. The SPÖ had its Arbeiter-Zeitung, the ÖVP its Kleines Volksblatt, the KPÖ its Volksstimme, and the three parties jointly retained Neues Österreich. Express entered that market as something different: an independent boulevard daily, in tabloid spirit, aimed at the general Viennese reader rather than at a party milieu. Its competition was the Kurier, refounded in 1954 and growing fast, and from April 1959 the refounded Kronen Zeitung under Hans Dichand, which would transform the entire market. Express belonged to the first generation of Austrian papers that had to win readers every day on news value, presentation and price rather than inherit them from a party organisation. That it survived for thirteen years, through changes of ownership, in the most contested newspaper city in the German-speaking world, was itself an achievement.

Purchase by the Socialist Party in 1960

In December 1960 the paper's ownership changed fundamentally: the SPÖ acquired Express, and the formerly independent boulevard daily became a Socialist Party paper. The acquisition reflected the SPÖ's media strategy of the period. Its historic organ, the Arbeiter-Zeitung, was a respected but traditional party paper; Express offered the party a modern popular title with a different voice and a broader street readership in Vienna. The paper is accordingly described in press histories both as a product of the SPÖ-linked Molden publishing circle in its origins and as the socialist daily Express in its maturity. One widely used history of the Austrian press records that the socialist daily Express was taken over by the Kronen Zeitung in the mid-1970s chronology of consolidation, a compressed reference to the Falk and Dichand takeover of December 1970 and the merger of April 1971 that ended the title. Under party ownership, Express continued as a boulevard paper, combining popular presentation with a centre-left political orientation.

The 1960s: competing with Krone and Kurier

The decade of the 1960s was the hardest competitive environment any Viennese paper had faced. The Kronen Zeitung under Dichand and his marketing strategist Kurt Falk built a circulation approaching and then passing one million, using promotions, campaigns and an unmatched feel for popular sentiment. The Kurier held the middle ground as Vienna's large independent daily. Express, as the SPÖ's boulevard paper, competed for the same kiosk buyer with fewer resources than the Krone and with the constraints that party ownership imposed. Yet the Austria-Forum and Viennese press histories remember it as a leading post-war boulevard title of the newspaper-war generation, not as a marginal party sheet. Its newsroom, inherited from the Bildtelegraf, knew illustrated popular journalism from the inside, and the paper's Vienna was the city of the economic miracle, of full employment, motorisation and the new television age.

Journalism and character

Express was a tabloid in the continental sense: a popular daily of bold headlines, photographs, short reports, sport, crime, human interest and metropolitan life, published for Vienna. It differed from the Arbeiter-Zeitung in register as much as in format; where the party's historic organ editorialised, Express entertained and informed quickly. That combination was the Molden circle's house style, visible also in the Wochenpresse, and it helped to modernise Austrian popular journalism after the war. Detailed records of its individual campaigns and editors are scarcer in English-language sources than those of Die Presse or the Krone, and this profile does not invent newsroom detail that the sources do not support. Its reputation in the reference literature rests on its position, as one of the defining boulevard papers of the 1950s and 1960s, and on the famous circumstances of its birth in the newspaper war and its death by merger with the Krone.

Takeover by Falk and Dichand in 1970

In December 1970 Kurt Falk and Hans Dichand took over Express. The buyers were the two men who had built the Kronen Zeitung: Dichand its founder-publisher, Falk his former right-hand man who had taken over a half share in the Krone itself. Their acquisition of the SPÖ's boulevard paper removed a competitor and, with it, the Socialists' popular Viennese daily. The takeover belonged to the great concentration movement that reshaped the Austrian press around 1970, as rising costs and the advertising power of the largest titles forced smaller and party-owned papers to fold, merge or sell. Party papers across Austria entered terminal decline in those years: the ÖVP's Kleines Volksblatt closed in 1970, and the party share of national circulation, about half in the early 1950s, fell steadily toward the two percent recorded at the century's end. Express was an early casualty of that structural change, despite its popular format.

Merger into the Kronen Zeitung in 1971

On 29 April 1971 Express was merged with the daily Neue Kronen Zeitung, as the Austria-Forum records, and ceased to appear as an independent title. The merger was an absorption: the Krone gained whatever readers, staff and market position Express still commanded, and Vienna lost a newspaper. Readers of the socialist boulevard paper were invited to become readers of a paper that was, politically, a very different product, populist and frequently at war with the SPÖ itself. The transaction says much about the Austria of 1971, the first full year of Bruno Kreisky's Social Democratic government. The governing party surrendered its popular daily to the publisher who would become its most powerful media critic, because the economics of newspaper ownership had ceased to follow the logic of political camps.

The newspaper war generation

Express belongs, with the Bildtelegraf it succeeded and the early Krone and Kurier it competed against, to what Viennese media memory calls the generation of the Zeitungskrieg. That war, fought with price cuts, promotions, exclusive stories and printing speed, created the modern Austrian popular press. Fritz Molden's role in it, as publisher of Die Presse, Wochenpresse, Bildtelegraf and Express in succession, made him the central entrepreneurial figure of the quality and boulevard press alike before his later career as a book publisher. Express was the war's last creation and one of its longer-lived products, appearing for thirteen years while many titles of the 1950s vanished within months. Viennese press histories and the Wien Geschichte Wiki preserve its dates precisely because it marked the end of that heroic, chaotic founding period.

Legacy

The paper's legacy is threefold. For the history of the SPÖ, Express represented the party's most ambitious attempt to speak in a popular boulevard voice, an attempt abandoned in 1970 and never repeated on the same scale. For the history of the Kronen Zeitung, its absorption was one of the steps by which Dichand eliminated Viennese competition and consolidated the Krone's dominance. And for Austrian journalism generally, Express demonstrated both the vitality of the post-war popular press and its vulnerability to concentration: founded in a newspaper war in 1958, owned by a great party in 1960, bought by the market leader in 1970 and merged out of existence in 1971, it lived through, in thirteen years, the entire trajectory of the Second Republic's press from pluralism to concentration.