About Volkszeitung

Volkszeitung

The Volkszeitung was a German-language newspaper published in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, from 1945 to February 1990. It was founded in 1945 by the Austrian People's Party, the ÖVP, first as a weekly and as a daily from 1946, and served Carinthia and East Tyrol as the conservative party paper of Austria's southernmost province. From 1971 it formed a newspaper ring with the Salzburger Volkszeitung and the Tiroler Nachrichten as head papers, an arrangement that reflected the ÖVP party-press system in the provinces. It was discontinued in February 1990, among the earlier of the major provincial party papers to close, a year before the Arbeiter-Zeitung and Volksstimme in Vienna brought the classic age of the Austrian party daily to its end.

Foundation in Klagenfurt in 1945

The paper was founded in Klagenfurt in 1945 by the ÖVP, in the founding season of the Second Republic's party press. Carinthia in 1945 was occupied by British forces, with Yugoslav troops and territorial claims in the south adding a dimension of insecurity felt in no other Austrian province except, in different form, Burgenland. A conservative daily in the provincial capital was both a party necessity and a statement of Austrian statehood in a border province. The Volkszeitung appeared first as a weekly in 1945 and became a daily from 1946, following the pattern of the other licensed party papers that began under the paper shortages of the liberation year and settled into daily publication as conditions allowed. Its base was Klagenfurt, but its claimed territory was the whole province, Carinthia, together with the district of East Tyrol, which administratively belongs to Tyrol but has historically oriented its communications toward Klagenfurt and Lienz rather than Innsbruck.

Carinthia's conservative newspaper

As the ÖVP's Carinthian organ, the Volkszeitung spoke for the province's conservative camp: farmers, the Catholic milieu, small-town business and the German-speaking majority's provincial patriotism, in a province where politics were also shaped by the presence of the Carinthian Slovene minority and by the memory of the 1920 plebiscite that had kept southern Carinthia in Austria. It competed in a small market. The dominant paper of the province was the Kleine Zeitung in its Klagenfurt edition, published by the Styria house from Graz and Klagenfurt, and the Social Democrats maintained their own Carinthian daily tradition that eventually bore the name Kärntner Tageszeitung. The Volkszeitung was thus, like most provincial party papers, a second or third paper in its own province, kept alive by party loyalty, subscriptions within its camp and the press-subsidy structures that supported pluralism among smaller Austrian dailies.

The newspaper ring of 1971

The paper's most distinctive institutional feature came in 1971, when it formed a newspaper ring, a Zeitungsring, with the Salzburger Volkszeitung and the Tiroler Nachrichten as its head papers. In a ring arrangement, smaller papers shared the mantle, the main news sections and much of the production apparatus of stronger titles, while retaining local pages and their own mastheads. For the ÖVP's provincial press, the ring was a rationalisation: three conservative papers in three neighbouring provinces, Salzburg, Tyrol and Carinthia, pooling the costly parts of daily newspaper production. The arrangement testified to the economic pressure already bearing on the party press by the early 1970s, the first great wave of Austrian press concentration, in which party papers across the country folded or sought shelter. The Volkszeitung's participation in the ring extended its life by nearly two decades beyond that turning point.

The ÖVP party-press system in the provinces

The Volkszeitung is best understood as one cell in a system. The ÖVP of the Second Republic maintained, at its strongest, a family of provincial papers: the Salzburger Volkszeitung in Salzburg, the Tiroler Nachrichten in Innsbruck, the Neues Volksblatt in Linz, the Südost-Tagespost in Graz and the Volkszeitung in Klagenfurt, together with the Kleines Volksblatt in Vienna. The SPÖ and KPÖ maintained parallel families. That system embodied the Lager theory of Austrian democracy, in which each camp educated its members through its own press, and it was protected by licensing in 1945 and by subsidies thereafter. Its decline was measured nationally: party papers accounted for about half of all daily circulation in 1953 and for only 2.2 percent in 2002. The Klagenfurt Volkszeitung's closure in February 1990 fell in the final phase of that decline, after the Graz ÖVP paper in 1987 and before the Viennese party dailies of the SPÖ, KPÖ and the Carinthian SPÖ paper, which survived, in the Kärntner Tageszeitung's case, until 2014.

Carinthia and East Tyrol coverage

In content the paper followed the provincial party-daily formula: national and international news drawn largely from the Austria Presse Agentur, provincial politics from Klagenfurt's Landhaus, municipal reporting, agricultural coverage for a province in which farming remained politically central, church and cultural life, and sport. Its service to East Tyrol gave it a cross-provincial readership unusual for a party paper and tied it, in readers' habits, to the Osttiroler Bote tradition of East Tyrolean local journalism. For Carinthian ÖVP functionaries, mayors, councillors and party members across the province's valleys, the Volkszeitung was for forty-five years the paper that reported their world from their own standpoint. That function, the internal communication of a political camp, was the one that neither the independent Kleine Zeitung nor the Vienna tabloids, whatever their circulation advantages, could perform for the party.

Competition and structural weakness

The paper's weaknesses were those of its type. Carinthia was the second-smallest provincial newspaper market in Austria, and the Klagenfurt edition of the Kleine Zeitung was one of the strongest regional papers in the country, rooted in Carinthia since the nineteenth century's Catholic press movement and professionally dominant in local reporting. The Kronen Zeitung's Carinthian expansion pressed both smaller papers from the 1970s onward. Advertising followed circulation, and party papers rarely won advertising beyond their own milieu. The 1971 ring was an admission of these facts and a partial remedy: shared production lowered costs but could not create readers. By the 1980s, as camp loyalty faded among younger Carinthians and the ÖVP itself reconsidered the value of owning newspapers, the question for the Volkszeitung was no longer how to grow but how long the party would continue to carry it.

Closure in February 1990

The Volkszeitung was discontinued in February 1990. The closure preceded, by a year, the annus horribilis of the Viennese party press in 1991, when both the Arbeiter-Zeitung and Volksstimme ceased daily publication, and it formed part of the same settlement of accounts that saw the ÖVP divest or close its remaining papers at the end of the 1980s; the People's Party sold its Neue Volkszeitung stake in Vienna in 1989, retaining only a small share. In Carinthia, conservative readers after February 1990 depended on the Kleine Zeitung and the national tabloids, and the ÖVP communicated through press work, broadcasting and, eventually, digital media rather than through a paper of its own. No successor daily under the Volkszeitung name was established in Klagenfurt.

Limits of the surviving record

The record for the Klagenfurt Volkszeitung in general and English-language reference works is thin, and this profile states that limit openly. Its foundation by the ÖVP in 1945, its weekly-then-daily rhythm, its service to Carinthia and East Tyrol, its participation with the Salzburger Volkszeitung and Tiroler Nachrichten in the 1971 newspaper ring, and its discontinuation in February 1990 are documented in Wikipedia's account of the paper and in lists of former Austrian dailies. Detailed circulation figures for particular years, the names of its editors and accounts of its individual campaigns are not available in the sources consulted and are not supplied here by conjecture. That thinness is itself part of the paper's history: the provincial party papers were chronicled less fully than the Viennese titles, and the survival of their files in libraries and in the Austrian National Library's collections matters more, for researchers, than the secondary literature about them.

Historical significance

The significance of the Volkszeitung lies in its representativeness. It was not Austria's largest, oldest or most famous party paper; it was a typical one, and its typicality makes it valuable evidence of how the Second Republic's democracy actually communicated with itself at provincial level. Through it, and its sister papers in Salzburg, Linz, Graz and Innsbruck, a Carinthian conservative could live an entire public life, from 1945 to 1990, inside the printed world of his own camp. The disappearance of that world, completed in Carinthia in February 1990, changed the province's politics as surely as any election: parties became users of media rather than owners of it, and readers became consumers rather than camp members. The Volkszeitung's forty-five years span that transformation almost exactly.

Legacy

In Carinthian press history the Volkszeitung survives as the conservative member of the province's post-war trio of dailies, alongside the independent Kleine Zeitung and the Social Democratic paper. Its name, shared confusingly with the Salzburger Volkszeitung and with several older Austrian titles, has required care from cataloguers and historians, and care has been taken in this profile to keep the Klagenfurt paper distinct from its Salzburg namesake, which outlived it by almost a quarter of a century. Together the two Volkszeitungen, and the ring that linked Klagenfurt to Salzburg and Innsbruck in 1971, illustrate the geography of the ÖVP press at its most systematic. The Klagenfurt paper's closure in 1990 closed that geography in the south, leaving Linz's Volksblatt tradition as the People's Party press's last provincial survivor into the twenty-first century.