Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Category: Media History

Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy

Focusing on the fate of a Berlin-based newspaper during the 1920s and 1930s, Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy chronicles the transformation of a vibrant and liberal society into an oppressive and authoritarian dictatorship. Tempo proclaimed itself as “Germany’s most modern newspaper” and attempted to capture the spirit of Weimar Berlin, giving a voice to a forward-looking generation that had grown up under the Weimar Republic’s new democratic order. The newspaper celebrated modern technology, spectator sports, and American consumer products, constructing an optimistic vision of Germany’s future as a liberal consumer society anchored in Western values.

Continue reading “Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy”

The media’s Weimar moment?

In 2016, before Trump was even sworn in as President, the Columbia Journalism Review compared the rise of “fake news” and the loss of conventional media’s authority to Weimar Germany. While the article is laced with stereotypical images of Weimar’s supposedly “decadent atmosphere”, there are some interesting insights: “The instruments of democracy were appropriated by anti-democratic forces and used to undermine the democratic institutions that had made them available.”

Anti-Semitism and the Press, 1918-33

f516f78b0c598526c1064601a5fb2c9a.media.200x33The University of Bremen in hosting the very interesting research project German Anti-Semitism and the Press during the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933, which ‘investigates, from a comparative and transnational perspective, the coverage of German anti-Semitism during the Weimar Republic in the international press, taking as examples Great Britain, France, Italy, Austria, and the United States’. The project website features a very comprehensive list of digitized German and international newspapers, which should make it an important post of call for anybody interested in the interwar press.

Journal Review: German History 4/2014

4.cover

In the December issue of German History, Heidi Tworek writes about the cooperation between German journalists and diplomats to raise Germany’s international profile after WWI: ‘From August 2013, a new, controversial ancillary copyright law (Leistungsschutzrecht) permitted German publishers to charge online news aggregator, such as Google for displaying article snippets. Implementation remains contested, but this is not the first time that new technology has prompted Germans to seek intellectual property rights in news. In August 1927, a German delegation successfully pushed through its compromise resolution on the legal protection of news during a Conference of Press Experts at the League of Nations. Continue reading “Journal Review: German History 4/2014”

New book on the interwar press

9780415747639The Press and Popular Culture in Interwar Europe – a selection of articles edited by Sarah Newman and Matt Houlbrook, originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies – shows the interwar years as a ‘formative and vital period in the making of the modern press’:

‘When situated within a comparative European framework it is clear that the transformation of the popular press took shape in parallel and through a process that we might think of as mutually constitutive between the wars; while it is important to remain alive to the importance of the local and the particular in understanding the development of transnational mass cultural forms, in other words, news, information and ideas constantly moved across national boundaries. Continue reading “New book on the interwar press”

Weimar Film and Jewish Identity

9780230341364In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity ‘provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous “German-Jewish symbiosis” before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framework for the understanding of the German “national” film in the years leading to Hitler’s regime.’

–> Review (in German)

Modernist Journals Project

mjpThe Modernist Journals Project at Brown University and the University of Tulsa has been an important digital archive since 1995, offering scans of English-language avant-garde publications from 1890 to 1922. The archive includes titles like Wyndham Lewis’ Blast, The Crisis and Scribner’s Magazine, and more will be added in the future.

Ullstein-Berichte online

UbThe Ullstein-Berichte, a public relations magazine distributed by the Ullstein publishing house from 1926-1933, has been digitized by the DFG-funded project Illustrierte Presse. The magazine is not only an important source for research on Ullstein and the Weimar press, but also on the developing marketing industry in Germany in the early 20th century.

European Film Gateway

efg_logoThe European Film Gateway is a single access point to films, images and texts from selected collections of 24 film archives across Europe: ‘The EFG Portal gives you quick access to hundreds of thousands of film historical documents as preserved in European film archives and cinémathèques: photos, posters, programmes, periodicals, censorship documents, rare feature and documentary films, newsreels and other materials.’

Jewish periodicals online

convert (1)The Compact Memory project has digitized 118 German-language Jewish periodicals, from Sulamith (1806-1843) to Central Verein-Zeitung (1922-1938) and Jüdische Welt-Rundschau (1939-1940). This amazing collection, financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), offers a wealth of material for scholars of German-Jewish history.

Illustrated magazines online

00000001.tif.originalThe University of Erfurt and the Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dresden offer an amazing collection of digitized illustrated magazines of the 1920s, including Der Querschnitt, UHU, Das jüdische Magazin, Kriminal-Magazin, Auto-Magazin, Das Magazin, Revue des Monats, Das Leben and Scherl’s Magazin.

More than 650 issues of these ‘magazines of classical modernity’ are available on the site, individually tagged with keywords such as ‘women’s liberation’, ‘car culture’, etc.

The project started in 2012, a work shop seminar on 4-5 July 2013 offers an introduction to featured magazines for interested researchers.