Pit dog (newspaper)

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A pit dog is a special form of newspaper duck and was particularly common in Austria from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century. It consists of a convincingly formulated, but factually nonsensical letter to the editor with which an editorial team is tricked by printing it without noticing the nonsense content. The name goes back to a satirical text by Karl Kraus .

target

The mine dog mostly arose out of a reader's annoyance about incompetent reporting. He wrote an article that was completely adapted to the style of the respective newspaper and exploited the respect for academic, aristocratic or official titles that is widespread in Austria, so that the responsible editors did not notice the nonsensical content. The intention was often to convict journalists of negligence, vanity and above all ignorance by means of a deliberately launched hoax . In contrast to the newspaper duck, misleading the reader was not the aim of a mine dog, but on the contrary, the exposure of the medium to the critical reader. Popular technique has been the misuse of technical terms, foreign language words, and contradicting statements. There were also acrostic stitches , the beginnings of which said the opposite of the actual poem.

history

The creator of the “pit dog” was the engineer Arthur Schütz , who took advantage of the Neue Freie Presse's need for articles with many technical terms about earthquakes on November 18, 1911.

Although the mine dog was only born in this letter to the editor, the suggestion came from a mine dog ante litteram , namely a letter to the editor from civil engineer J. Berdach, which appeared on February 22, 1908 in the Neue Freie Presse. It reproduced observations on an earthquake and contained nonsense such as the “variability of the impermeability” or “telluric earthquakes (in the narrower sense)”, which are to be distinguished from a “cosmic earthquake (in the broader sense)” as being essentially different. This Ing. Berdach (in reality Karl Kraus) can be considered the originator of the pit dogs and trolleys, even if they were not called that at that time, in 1908.

Arthur Schütz wrote in 1911 under the name Dr. Ing.Erich Ritter von Winkler sentences like:

"I was sitting alone in the compressor room when - it was exactly 10:27 minutes - the large 400-horse power compressor that feeds the electric motor for the steam superheater began to show a noticeable variety of voltage."

and

"However, it is completely inexplicable that my pit dog, sleeping in the laboratory, gave conspicuous signs of great unrest half an hour before the start of the quake."

This sentence established the name "pit dog". A pit hunt refers to a freight wagon used underground (similar to a freight cart ). The Neue Freie Presse was the preferred victim of pit dogs, for example refractory coal, rectangular circles, Senator Duca Melbista-Berso-Thum (you camel are so stupid), meowing trolleys and other things . But other newspapers also received mine dogs, which contained, among other things, copper insulators, bent lines of sight , degenerators and similar nonsense. Most of the authors of pit dogs, unlike Schütz, remained undetected.

The mine dog gained a cultural-political dimension when the German-Austrian daily newspaper on February 27, 1924 was the only newspaper in Europe to report an alleged shooting in a Transylvanian village and the arrest of the guilty party. The tendentious report was meant seriously, but recognized as fabricated. Subsequently, “eyewitness reports” appeared, naming many of those guilty of the bloodbath and the victims (all with invented names from Schiller's robbers and Wallenstein ), including Rittmeister Neumann, who died of “a purulent ovarian ulcer ”. "Only one escaped as if by miracle: the urban speedometer Dredich ...". One of the culprits was Banjakutya (in German: pit dog).

More serious and dangerous for the author, an anonymous Prague satirist, was the pit dog he was able to put under the name "Heinz Werner Spalowski" in the National Socialist journal of North Bohemia, Der Tag : a polemic against Heine and alleged "Jewish falsifications", brimming with deliberate mistakes German poetry, but in which the anti-Semitic tone corresponded perfectly to the character of the newspaper.

Since newspapers later relied primarily on reports from press agencies , pit dogs appeared rarely in later times. The fictitious award of 27 Grillparzer prizes to 27 different authors by anonymous actionists (1993) and the Sokal affair (1996) show that pit dogs still occur.

See also

literature

  • Sigismund von Radecki : The pit dog. In: Sigismund von Radecki: The rose and the brick. Anecdotes from all over the world. Rowohlt, Berlin 1938, p. 277 f.
  • Werner Fuld : Pit dog. In: Werner Fuld: The lexicon of forgeries. Falsifications, lies and conspiracies from art, history, science and literature. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-8218-1444-6 , p. 96 f.
  • Hans E. Goldschmidt: Of pit dogs and tied up bears in the forest of leaves. Jugend und Volk, Vienna et al. 1981, ISBN 3-224-16000-4 .
  • Arthur Schütz : The pit dog. Experiments with the truth (= series ex libris communication. Vol. 5). Edited and introduced by Walter Hömberg . Fischer, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-88927-159-6 . (First edition 1931 by Jahoda & Siegel, the publisher of Karl Kraus)

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Kraus: The pit dog . The torch. Volume XIII, issue 336–337, p. 5 ff., From November 23, 1911. As a result, Karl Kraus used the term in the torch 99 times up to 1931.
  2. ^ Original publication, "Neue Freie Presse", November 18, 1911, Vienna (page 10) - archive
  3. ^ Karl Kraus: The earthquake . The torch. Year 1908, issue 245, p. 16 ff, especially p. 22 f.
  4. ^ Karl Kraus: The pit dog . The torch. Volume XIII, issue 336-337, pp. 5 ff., From November 23, 1911.
  5. ^ Neue Freie Presse, March 3, 1913, quoted in Karl Kraus: Verbrecherische Irreführung der Neue Freie Presse , Die Fackel, Volume XV, Issue 372/373, pp. 1 ff., April 1, 1913.
  6. ↑ Neue Freie Presse, xx. July 1916, in Karl Kraus: Die Laufkatze , Die Fackel, Volume XVIII, Issue 431, p. 116 ff., August 2, 1916.
  7. ↑ Hans Veigl : Arthur Schütz in loners & eccentrics. Outsiders against the zeitgeist , Verlag Böhlau, Vienna 2008, p. 187 ff.
  8. ↑ From the secret subjects of literary history in Der Tag vom 9. “Eismond” (January) 1931, reproduced in: Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, Volume XXXII, Issue 852, p. 29 ff., Mid-May 1931.

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