About Neues Wiener Journal

Neues Wiener Journal

The Neues Wiener Journal was a German-language daily newspaper published in Vienna from 22 October 1893 to 31 January 1939. It was one of the leading liberal newspapers in Austria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a popular morning paper known for its feuilleton, its local reporting and its aggressive early promotion, which for decades competed with the Neue Freie Presse and the Neues Wiener Tagblatt for the capital's readers. Like them, it was destroyed by the Nazi takeover of the Austrian press: Aryanised within a week of the Anschluss in March 1938, it was merged with the Neue Freie Presse into the Neues Wiener Tagblatt at the end of January 1939.

The Journal's history offers a particularly clear view of the Viennese popular-liberal press as a business. Its founder, Jakob Lippowitz, launched it with a promotional stunt, the free distribution of an enormous daily edition, that contemporaries discussed for years, and its ownership passed through a tangle of partnerships and printing companies typical of the era. Its literary distinction was real: Hermann Bahr's diary column in its pages was a notable feature of Viennese cultural journalism. And its end was as abrupt as its beginning was theatrical.

Founding by Jakob Lippowitz in 1893

The Neues Wiener Journal first appeared on 22 October 1893, founded by Jakob Lippowitz. The new paper entered a crowded market: Vienna in 1893 already had the Neue Freie Presse, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Die Presse, the Catholic dailies and a swarm of smaller titles. Lippowitz's answer was promotion on an unprecedented scale. To launch the Journal, he freely distributed a daily edition of 200,000 copies for several weeks, flooding the city with his paper until its name was unavoidable.

The stunt worked commercially and damaged the paper reputationally in equal measure. Histories of the Viennese press record that an aura of corruption clung to the Neues Wiener Journal from the very outset, a judgement on the methods of its launch as much as on its content. Lippowitz nevertheless built a durable title: he remained the paper's publisher until the end of September 1922, almost twenty-nine years after its founding, one of the long personal proprietorships of the Viennese press.

Printing House and Ownership Changes

The paper was printed at first in its own printing works, the Druckerei des Neuen Wiener Journals. From 24 July 1897, printing passed to Lippowitz & Co, the printing company Lippowitz had founded with Carl Anton Reichel. That partnership structured the paper's later ownership. When Lippowitz stepped back at the end of September 1922, Reichel became the paper's owner, publisher and editor from 1 October 1922, with Lippowitz & Co as the publishing company.

Further changes followed. At the turn of 1932 and 1933, A. Loewenstein entered the business, and the publishing house became Neues Wiener Journal, A. Loewenstein & Co, with Reichel remaining as editor. From 25 September 1934 the paper reverted to the Lippowitz & Co name, again with Carl Reichel as owner and publisher. The sequence, personal proprietor, partnership, investor entry, reversion, was typical of the financially precarious quality press of the First Republic, where even established titles changed their corporate shape repeatedly while keeping the same name on the masthead.

Format and Pattern of Publication

The Neues Wiener Journal measured 43 by 28 centimetres and was set in three columns, a handy format for a popular daily. It appeared daily in the morning for most of its life, with two wartime and post-war exceptions that the bibliographic record preserves precisely. From 22 August 1914 to 31 December 1921, during the First World War and the difficult years that followed, it appeared as a midday paper instead. From 2 August 1921 to 7 July 1922 it appeared daily except Mondays as both a morning and an evening paper.

The paper also had a weekly companion: from 1903 to 1915 it published the Neue Wiener Wochenjournal once a week. And it reached beyond Vienna with branch editorial offices, a mark of its ambition in the First Republic: from 21 February 1922 to 31 December 1930 it maintained an editorial office in Prague, and from 18 October 1929 to 17 July 1930, under the editor August Flak, one in Katowice as well, serving readers in the successor states whose German-reading publics Viennese papers had served before 1918.

Editorial Character: Liberal, Popular, Feuilleton-Led

The Journal was a liberal paper in the Viennese sense: bourgeois, secular in outlook, and addressed to the broad reading public rather than to a party. It was known for its feuilleton and its local reporting, the mixture of culture, city news, courts and human interest that defined the successful Viennese popular daily. Where the Neue Freie Presse's feuilleton was an academy, the Journal's was a tribune for the day, lively, topical and close to its readers' lives.

Its best-known literary feature was Hermann Bahr's diary. Bahr, the critic and dramatist who had introduced one literary movement after another to Vienna, kept a Tagebuch, a diary column, in the Neues Wiener Journal that scholars have studied under the apt description Tribüne für den Tag, a tribune for the day. The column's reception, including its treatment in Karl Kraus's Die Fackel, documents both the paper's cultural reach and the ferocity with which Vienna's critics policed one another. That a popular commercial daily carried one of the era's defining critics as a regular columnist says much about the Journal's ambitions.

The Paper in the First Republic

Through the First Republic, the Journal held its place among Vienna's leading dailies in a market that was shrinking and polarising. The empire-wide readership of the monarchy was gone; in its place were party camps with their own papers, rising circulation for the cheap Kronen Zeitung, and, from the late 1920s, economic crisis. The Journal's Prague and Katowice offices in the 1920s were an attempt to hold the old imperial market together commercially even after it had fallen apart politically.

The paper's politics in the republic remained those of the liberal centre it had served since 1893, a centre that was losing ground on every side: to the Social Democrats in Red Vienna, to the Christian Socials in the federal government, to the authoritarian regime after 1933, and finally to the National Socialists who destroyed the republic and then the paper itself. Its history in these years is therefore also evidence for the collapse of the liberal public sphere in Austria, recorded in ownership changes and shrinking room for manoeuvre rather than in any single dramatic editorial stand.

Aryanisation After the Anschluss

The end came immediately after Germany annexed Austria. On 19 March 1938, a week after the Anschluss, the popular newspaper was Aryanised, seized, that is, from the sphere of its previous ownership under the regime's racial expropriation of the press. The paper continued to appear with Carl Reichel as publisher and owner until the beginning of August 1938, and was then continued under National Socialist control.

The Journal's treatment fitted the regime's general settlement of the Viennese press in 1938 and 1939: titles were closed, sold at dictated prices to Nazi publishing houses, or, in the Tagblatt's case, kept as the regime's central organ. The Journal, a liberal paper with a Jewish founder and a suspect past, was not kept. It was wound down as an independent title over the winter of 1938 and 1939 and then abolished by merger.

Merger and Last Issue in 1939

At the beginning of 1939 the Neues Wiener Journal was merged, together with the Neue Freie Presse, into the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. The last issue of the Neues Wiener Journal appeared on 31 January 1939. With it, a title that had been part of Viennese mornings for more than forty-five years disappeared, its readers transferred to a Tagblatt that was by then wholly an instrument of the Nazi publishing empire centred on the Franz Eher Verlag.

No attempt was made to revive the Journal after 1945. Post-war Vienna rebuilt its press around the party papers, the occupation papers and, from 1948, new independent titles such as the refounded Die Presse; the commercial liberal daily of the Lippowitz type had no second life. The Journal survives instead as a complete historical source, read today in the National Library's collections by historians of the monarchy and the First Republic.

How Contemporaries Judged It

Contemporary judgement of the Journal was double-edged, and an accurate profile should keep both edges. On one side stood its achievement: a leading liberal newspaper of the late monarchy and the republic, a serious feuilleton that employed Hermann Bahr, and a popular reach built from nothing in a saturated market. On the other stood the manner of its making: the free-distribution launch of 200,000 copies a day, remembered for decades, and the aura of corruption that historians of the Viennese press say clung to the paper from the outset.

Karl Kraus, the era's hanging judge of the press, treated the Journal as part of the corrupt liberal newspaper world he existed to expose, and his later editors still annotate its name for modern readers as one of the leading liberal newspapers of Austria, a footnote that captures the paradox exactly: a paper significant enough to be denounced at length, and denounced in terms that confirm its significance. Both the denunciations and the paper's own pages are now primary sources, and they are best read together.

Place in Austrian Press History

Among Vienna's liberal dailies, the Neues Wiener Journal occupied the popular middle: below the Neue Freie Presse in prestige, broader and more promotion-driven in method, and longer-lived than most of the boulevard ventures of its era. It belonged to the generation of titles founded in the 1890s, with the Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung of 1900, that turned the Viennese press from a press of opinion into a press of mass circulation, and it shared the fate of that generation's liberal wing in 1938 and 1939.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these. The Neues Wiener Journal was a German-language daily published in Vienna, founded by Jakob Lippowitz with a first issue on 22 October 1893; it was published by Lippowitz until 1922 and thereafter by Carl Reichel and partners; it appeared as a morning paper of 43 by 28 centimetres, with a Prague office in the 1920s and a weekly companion from 1903 to 1915; it was Aryanised on 19 March 1938; and its last issue appeared on 31 January 1939, when it was merged into the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. It is a closed newspaper, recorded here in the past tense.