BZ at noon

BZ advertising poster 1904

Advertising column , Wannseebadweg 25, in Berlin-Nikolassee

The BZ am Mittag (Berliner Zeitung am Mittag) was the first German tabloid . The Ullstein sheet was published from 1904 to 1943.

history

BZ am Mittag was the first street-market tabloid for the German newspaper market. On October 22, 1904, the first edition appeared in the style and presentation of American models.

The abbreviation "BZ" stands for "Berliner Zeitung", as the newspaper was originally called. This was first published on January 1, 1878 by Ullstein Verlag . In 1904, the newspaper makers completely revised the concept of the paper. The driving force behind the project was the son of the publisher's founder, Louis-Ferdinand Ullstein . The morning edition was discontinued because it represented useless competition to the publisher's own Berliner Morgenpost . Although it was run twice for a few months, only one issue a day was published instead of the morning and evening issues, as was previously the case. This saved costs. At the same time, an agreement with the competitor August Scherl that none of the publishers could bring a new newspaper onto the market without the consent of the other was avoided . The first two years cannot be found on the microfilm and cannot be verified with the ZDB newspaper database, so they must currently be considered lost.

Before 1914, the newspaper had its own foreign correspondents in London , New York , Paris and elsewhere. The paper landed its first big coup with the Daily Telegraph affair in 1908. After the interview with Wilhelm II was published in the Daily Telegraph , the BZ distributed the interview domestically only three hours later at noon. Speed was the hallmark of this newspaper, and it advertised: "... the fastest newspaper in the world". Reports could be incorporated up to half an hour before the start of street sales at 1 p.m. Street sales were the main sales channel , which also made sense: In 1908, 174,000 passers-by frequented Potsdamer Platz in one hour, they were the potential customers of the newspaper boys who were piled away. The newspaper did not shy away from questionable practices either: when the fugitive Karl Rudolf Hennig was wanted in 1906, the newspaper published fictitious interviews and reports where Hennig had been seen.

In December 1931, editor-in-chief Franz Höllering published internal documents of the NSDAP on the establishment of an illegal National Socialist Air Corps . Carl von Ossietzky commented on his replacement by the publisher in the Weltbühne on January 5, 1932 as “the most scandalous surrender to National Socialism”, as “a crime against German freedom of the press”.

The last edition appeared on February 26, 1943, after which the newspaper was discontinued as a measure of the " total war ".

In 1953, after the restitution of the expropriated Ullstein property, the BZ emerged from the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag . This was published in Berlin (West) and had no connection whatsoever to the Berliner Zeitung , which was founded in East Berlin in 1945, from the Berliner Verlag .

Editors-in-chief

1904 to 1909: Wilhelm Auspitzer (1867–1931)
1909 to 1925: Max Wolf (1877–1925)
1925 to 1926: Ernst Wallenberg (1878–1948)
1926 to 1931: Franz Höllering (1896–1968)
Ernst von der Betten (1894–1958)

Known employees

Web links

Commons : BZ at noon - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ Heinz Ullstein : Playground of my life. Memories. Kindler, Berlin 1961, pp. 34-38.
↑ BZ at noon. Retrieved November 25, 2019 .
^ David Clay Large: Berlin. Biography of a city. Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-48881-1 , p. 100 f.

[1] Heinz Ullstein : Playground of my life. Memories. Kindler, Berlin 1961, pp. 34-38.

[2] BZ at noon. Retrieved November 25, 2019 .

[3] David Clay Large: Berlin. Biography of a city. Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-48881-1 , p. 100 f.