About Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung

Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung

The Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung was a German-language weekly newspaper published in New Braunfels, Texas, beginning on November 12, 1852. It was founded in a town that was itself only seven years old, created to give the German settlers of Comal County a newspaper in their own language and to promote the reputation of New Braunfels so that more settlers would follow. In time it became one of the most durable German-language newspapers in Texas, never missing an issue across a publishing history that stretched, under its original name and through later mergers, from 1852 into the second half of the twentieth century.

The newspaper's story was inseparable from the story of German Texas. Its first editor was a botanist, its early backer a revolutionary exile, and its pages carried a frontier community through the Civil War, two world wars and the slow transition of its readers from German to English. When the German-language edition finally disappeared, the Zeitung's name and lineage survived inside the merged New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, which continued the line that began in 1852.

Founding in a German Colony Town

New Braunfels was founded in March 1845 by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels as the first settlement of the Adelsverein, the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas. The settlers who arrived under that colonization program built a distinctly German town on the Comal and Guadalupe rivers, and by the early 1850s the community had grown large enough to support a newspaper of its own.

The Zeitung appeared on November 12, 1852. The enterprise was undertaken in part to boost the reputation of the young city and attract additional settlers, and it was backed by the political activist Adolph Douai, who helped raise the funds to launch it. Douai was a Forty-Eighter, a participant in the German revolutions of 1848 who had been imprisoned for his political activity and pressured to emigrate, arriving in New Braunfels in 1851. His friend Ferdinand Lindheimer became the paper's first editor.

Ferdinand Lindheimer, the Botanist Editor

Ferdinand Jakob Lindheimer was an unusual founding editor. An early Texas German settler, he was known principally as a botanist who collected Texas plants for scientific institutions and is remembered as the father of Texas botany, with more than twenty species and a genus bearing his name. In 1852 he was hired as editor of the new German-language weekly and, together with Douai, helped establish the Die Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung.

Lindheimer's personality and standing gave the newspaper a distinctive cultural role in pioneer German Texas during its first two decades. A scholarly portrait of the weekly under his editorship covers the years 1852 to 1872, the period in which the paper set the tone for public life in the settlement. Lindheimer remained a central figure in New Braunfels until his death on December 2, 1879; his house in the town was later preserved as a museum and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.

Adolph Douai and the Founders' Circle

Douai's own newspaper career quickly moved beyond New Braunfels. After his attempt to run a school in the town faltered, he moved to nearby San Antonio and launched the San Antonio Deutsche Zeitung on July 5, 1853. In that paper he denounced slavery as an evil incompatible with democracy and advocated a free state in western Texas, positions that drew threats against him and forced him to sell the paper in 1856.

The contrast between the two ventures says much about the Zeitung's character. Where Douai's San Antonio paper was a combative abolitionist organ, the New Braunfels weekly he had helped finance settled into the steadier role of community newspaper. The founders' circle nonetheless stamped the Zeitung from birth as a product of the educated, politically experienced Forty-Eighter generation that shaped so much of German-Texan public life.

A Weekly That Never Missed an Issue

The Zeitung, affectionately remembered as "die gute alte Tante" — the good old aunt — was said never to have missed an issue in its 102-year history under that name. That record was maintained under frontier conditions that repeatedly threatened publication, most severely during the Civil War.

When normal paper supplies were cut off during the war, the newspaper occasionally appeared printed on butcher paper, tissue paper or even many-colored wallpaper rather than suspend publication. The improvisation became one of the best-known episodes in the paper's history and a measure of how essential a weekly connection the Zeitung had become for German-speaking families scattered across the settlements of Central Texas.

Editors of the Nineteenth Century

After Lindheimer, a succession of editors carried the paper through the later nineteenth century. They included Anselm Eiband, Ernest Koebig and Ludolph LaFrentz, names that recur in accounts of German-Texan journalism of the period. Under these editors the Zeitung remained a weekly serving a readership whose farms, churches, schools and singing societies still operated largely in German.

Toward the end of the century the business was put on a more formal footing when the Zeitung Publishing Company was organized to run the newspaper. That corporate reorganization closed the paper's pioneer phase and prepared it for its longest single proprietorship, which began at the turn of the century.

The Oheim Era, 1899 to 1947

In 1899 G. F. Oheim bought the property and served as editor and publisher until his death in 1947, a tenure of nearly half a century that spanned the paper's mature German-language years. Under Oheim the Zeitung chronicled a community that was prosperous and institutionally complete in German, even as the world around it changed.

The Oheim years included the First World War, when German-language newspapers across Texas operated under intense suspicion. The Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, like other German-Texan papers, took conspicuous care to demonstrate loyalty, repeatedly printing appeals to buy Liberty Bonds and praising official information campaigns; across Texas the number of German-language publications fell by roughly half between 1914 and 1919. The Zeitung survived that contraction, as it had survived the Civil War, and continued as the German voice of Comal County.

English Enters the Paper

When Oheim died in 1947, his son Frederic succeeded him as owner and editor. The succession coincided with a demographic turning point: the number of German-language subscribers was declining as younger generations of German Texans read English. In 1948 Frederic Oheim responded by adding English-language content to the newspaper.

The change was gradual rather than abrupt. The Zeitung had served readers in German for ninety-six years before English appeared in its pages, and the bilingual transition reflected the pace at which New Braunfels itself was shifting languages. The paper's identity, however, was about to be reshaped by merger rather than by language alone.

Mergers: Zeitung-Chronicle and the Herald

In 1954 the newspaper merged with the Comal County Chronicle and became the Zeitung-Chronicle. Three years later, in 1957, the weekly English-language New Braunfels Herald, founded in 1892 and led for many years by Charles Scruggs, bought the Zeitung-Chronicle. The company continued to publish both newspapers separately, each once a week.

The German-language portion was dropped following the 1957 purchase, and by late 1958 the Zeitung had ceased printing in German altogether, ending a run of more than a century of German journalism that had begun in 1852. In 1967 the separate editions were dropped and the merged newspaper appeared as the English-only weekly Herald and Zeitung; the name was shortened to Herald-Zeitung in 1979. Taylor Communications bought the paper in 1980, when it became a five-day daily, sold it to Southern Newspapers in 1984, and it became a morning newspaper in 1986, still carrying the Zeitung name in its masthead.

The Community the Zeitung Served

For most of its German-language life, the Zeitung's readers lived in one of the most thoroughly German communities in the United States. German immigrants and their descendants maintained the language in their schools, churches and cultural societies well into the twentieth century, and the newspaper was the printed connective tissue of that world, carrying local news, agricultural intelligence, announcements and correspondence to farm families across Comal County and beyond.

The paper's original purpose — to present New Braunfels favorably and draw settlers — broadened into the general work of a county weekly, but its cultural function remained distinctive: it allowed a German-speaking public in Texas to follow American public life without surrendering its own language. That function explains both the paper's longevity and the affectionate nickname its readers gave it.

Archives and Preservation

Surviving issues of the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung are preserved in research collections, including the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, which holds digitized issues such as those of March 8, 1888, November 10, 1876 and March 27, 1924. The run of the paper is a primary source for the history of German settlement in Texas, consulted by historians of immigration, of the German-language press and of the state's wartime home fronts.

The Herald-Zeitung's own institutional history was itself nearly a casualty of nature: a serious flood in 1998 damaged the successor company's offices, archives and press, forcing a relocation of its printing facilities. That the combined enterprise traced its service to New Braunfels and Comal County back to 1852 — the Zeitung's founding year — kept the German weekly's origin at the center of the modern paper's identity.

Legacy

The Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung lasted longer than almost any of the roughly one hundred German-language newspapers founded in nineteenth-century Texas, most of which survived only a few years. It outlasted slavery, the Confederacy, the frontier and the language shift of its own readership, adapting through new owners, a bilingual phase and two mergers.

Its legacy was twofold. In its own right it was the record of a German colony town growing into an American city, kept week by week for more than a hundred years. And through the Herald-Zeitung name it founded in partnership with its old English-language rival, the Zeitung remained, in name at least, part of the daily life of the community it was created in 1852 to promote.