The Week (1899-1944)
| The week: modern illustrated magazine | |
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| description | Berlin weekly newspaper |
| Area of Expertise | Newspaper for the general public |
| language | German |
| publishing company | August Scherl Verlag / Hugenberg Group (Germany) |
| First edition | March 18, 1899 |
| attitude | September 6, 1944 |
| Frequency of publication | weekly |
| editor | August Scherl |
| ZDB | 512677-0 |
Die Woche was an illustrated magazine in Germany, founded in 1899 by Berlin's August Scherl Verlag, discontinued in 1944.
History of origin
The technical prerequisites for an inexpensive, up-to-date illustrated mass publication had been in place since around 1890. The photography was sufficiently developed. Advances in printing technology made it possible to use the recordings in magazines. The line typesetting machine ( Linotype ) and cheaper papermaking favored the development.
In 1894, the publisher Leopold Ullstein bought the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) in order to bring it to market with a different concept. The goal was: reporting with the most current images possible. The background was the “newspaper war” of the 1890s, the competition between the Berlin publishers Leopold Ullstein, Rudolf Mosse and August Scherl for supremacy on the newspaper market.
The Scherl Verlag started Die Woche 1899 as a counterweight to the BIS . Here, too, the focus should be on image reporting on current events. A publisher's brochure described the new sheet as a “valuable addition to the daily newspaper”, suitable for “relieving busy people of the time-consuming and arduous work” of reading several newspapers. The first editor-in-chief was Paul Dobert (1860–1931).
The week was in competition with Ullstein's Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and was noticeably falling behind. It was considered provincial, and the number of copies sold fell short of the BIS sales figures . In 1916 the Scherl-Verlag became the property of the Hugenberg Group . The week appeared without a break well into World War II . In 1944 it was discontinued due to the war.
Between 1993 and 2002 the title Die Woche was used for a weekly newspaper of a completely different kind.
Content
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The focus was on the image material. The aim was also to have the closest possible relationship between the illustrations and the articles. Only the “Pictures of the Day” fell out of this scheme, which stood for themselves and only had captions. In volume 3/1905 this section consists of eight pages of high-quality paper with 18 portrait photographs (including the physicist Ernst Abbe, who died in 1905, and the "chairwoman of the bazaar in the Prinzessinnenpalais" Berlin, Duchess Wilhelm zu Mecklenburg), but also photographs of the general strike in the Ruhr area and that official closing photo of the Hull Commission in Paris, licensed by the French Illustrée. In addition to the casual conversation with serial novels and gossip, Die Woche accompanied challenging topics of the time, such as:
- "The current state of lighting technology"
- "School and Life"
- "Local legal care"
- "About gunshot wounds from the modern infantry rifle"
- "Passports in old and new times"
Like the booklets from the 1910s, a typical booklet from the 1920s also comprised 40 pages. The editorial part began with a review of the week's news, which mainly concerned political issues. In the 1920s, fixed rubrics took up a total of around ten pages: Berliner Notebook, Theater und Musik, Die Börsenwoche , What Doctors Say, Hints for Our Women, the Dead of the Week, and others. In between serial novels and literary sketches, social reports, reports from science, art and sport, ten to twelve pages with puzzles, tips for radio hobbyists . More than a third of the magazine consisted of advertising. This proportion held up in the 1930s.
Even after Hitler came to power , the week initially followed a politically moderate, educated middle class course. In issue 40 of October 1935 , for example, there are only two photos with explicitly National Socialist content: SS soldiers give men of the Reich Labor Service pin badges; Reich Minister of War Werner von Blomberg at the topping-out ceremony in the Olympic Village . The central article in this issue consists of five pages with aesthetically sophisticated photographs by the Scherl picture service and deals with the flight day of the Seefliegerstaffel over the Bay of Kiel, always close to popular natural science: “The white shining propellers don't really stand still; at an exposure time of 1/500 of a second they were drawn so sharply by the optical lens, while they appear to the human eye as transparent panes. ”In the 1940s, the magazine was entirely in line with National Socialism , and covers with happy soldiers (e.g. "Comrades of the Mountains" in issue 6/1941) or the Nazi celebrities became the rule, such as "Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels ”in edition 13/1941,“ Reichssportführer ”in edition 37/1942 and“ Großadmiral Dönitz and Reichsminister Speer ”in edition 50/1943.
Text example from 1905
About gunshot wounds from the modern infantry rifle
“As early as 1872, at the first congress of German surgeons, von Volkmann, when comparing the fractures of the lower extremities in times of war and times of peace, reported the surprising fact that the former are more favorable than the latter, or, in other words, that the latter are less than to die of these. Although the bullet fractures are usually splinter fractures and the complicated, i. H. Peace fractures associated with a soft tissue wound, even under the disreputable conditions of the Crimean campaign, died less from bullet fractures of the lower leg, namely 25 pct., than died in the model hospitals of Europe during peace, namely 32.5 pct. The reason for this could only be the different nature of the soft tissue wounds complicating the fracture. In the case of peace violations, regardless of whether a machine injures the leg with its teeth and bars or the wheel of a tram goes over it, they are big and wide-gaping, in the case of war injuries small and cramped. The harmful substances causing inflammation - the pus cocci - can penetrate into these much more easily than into these. The new doctrine of wound poisoning explained the striking fact. "
Text example from 1913
Bison hunting in the car
“The engine is working. I take a seat behind the wide steering wheel, my native scout next to me, then we slide slowly out onto the bumpy forest path. [...] then I stop at the edge of a broad, but now flat river during the dry season. [...] Releasing the brake, I shoot from the steep bank into the water, which rears up foaming in front of the engine - a thick cloud of steam hisses up as the glowing exhaust gases get straight into the water. Water seeps through the floor, flooding your feet in a scorching wave. The machine works like mad, thanks to the switched on small transmission, dragging the heavy wagon with enormous force over large stone blocks and rubble. The engine holds out, the steep bank on the other side has been reached. "
Text example from 1925
Competitor woman
“The fact that nature has given women a different role in the theater of life than that of men should probably not be denied by anyone, not even women. But no one with insight will want to deny that life, no matter how naturally it is still subject to the basic laws of creation, has developed in many ways contrary to nature. Whether one wants to interpret this in such a way that the men of the world are no longer sufficient, purely numerically no longer sufficient to meet the obligations that life imposes on the human race, or whether one wants to give women an increased urge to act, which they do lets appear as a competitor against the man - that is basically indifferent. Because such considerations change nothing in the fact as such. And the fact is that the man no longer has to go out alone to talk to Schiller, to fight there, to strive there; It is also a fact that women are no longer there alone to plait and weave heavenly roses in earthly life; rather they are on the map, and often even as opponents. "
Text example from 1935
Achmed reads Goethe - German teachers in Afghanistan
“Achmed tells while we are heading for the school house. Much has always been said about Germany in his family, especially since the German-Austrian military mission during the war, which spread the most lively sympathies. At that time there was still an argument as to whether French, Russian or English was the finer one. In the meantime, however, the state has awakened to the recognition of its political situation. English: Certainly, one should learn it, but not give the sons a complete English upbringing: England is waiting in the south for Afghanistan. And certainly not Russian: Russia is waiting in the north. So French or German? Well, the German school is famous, and that's where we learn French too. The Germans have no political intentions on us. "
literature
- Konrad Dussel : Images as a message: Image structures of German magazines 1905 - 1945 in the field of tension between politics, business and the public . Cologne: Herbert von Halem, 2019 ISBN 978-3-86962-415-0
- Ralf Dahrendorf : Liberal and independent. Gerd Bucerius and his time. 2nd Edition. Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46474-2 .
- Business advertisement "The Week" . In: Address book for Berlin and its suburbs , 1900, appendix, p. 62 (from the same publisher as the address book).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Die Woche , Issue 3/1905. In school and life , “Director Dr. Pabst in Leipzig “a gloomy picture of elementary school as a teaching institution for knowledge instead of ability (p. 91–94)
- ↑ Die Woche , No. 2/1905. Conrad Bornhak predicts a quick end to the passport and is surprised that “the passport has not yet completely disappeared into the historical junk room”. (Pp. 78–80)
- ↑ Die Woche , Issue 40, 1935, pp. 10 ff.
- ^ Die Woche , No. 2, 1905, p. 61.
- ↑ Die Woche , No. 51, 1913, p. 2140.
- ↑ Die Woche , issue 27, July 4, 1925, pp. 124–125.
- ^ Die Woche , Issue 40, 1935, p. 20.