Memel steamboat

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The Memeler Dampfboot was one of the oldest and most successful German-language daily newspapers in Northeast Prussia and later in the Memel region . Since 1950 it has appeared as a monthly newspaper for the evicted Memel countries .

The first edition appeared a year after the revolution of 1848 on July 3, 1849 in the city of Memel , which then had 10,000 inhabitants. It was made in the Teubert und Stobbe printing house. Its founders belonged to the liberal revolutionary movement and described their paper as "a decent and liberally run newspaper". For the first 23 years, August Stobbe was the sole printer and publisher. Until 1850 the Memel steamboat appeared twice, then three times a week. In 1852 the Memeler Kreisblatt was added, which at the same time increased the range. The publisher Willy Siebert (publisher) , owner of the Memeler Zeitung , bought the print shop and the Memeler steamboat in 1872 . After modernizing the company, the newspaper appeared daily, but with fewer pages. A first editor was hired for this, the almost sixty-year-old Rabbi Dr. Isaak Rülf , from Hesse and living in the city of Memel.

On January 1st , 1895, the Memel steamboat received its first direct telephone connection to Berlin and at the beginning of the 20th century, a rotary machine replaced the previously manually operated high-speed press. In addition, a Linotype typesetting machine supported the time-consuming manual typesetting . After sixteen years, Rülf was replaced in 1898 by Ludwig Sochaczewer from Munich , who in the previous years had played a major role in the introduction of the telephone news service in the editorial office of the Memel steam boat . This enabled not only the latest news from the area to be printed promptly, but also from the German Empire and abroad.

From the turn of the century, the editors changed at shorter intervals. In 1908 the Memel steamboat had 5600 subscribers in the city, which at that time already had 21,000 inhabitants. The quarterly subscription price was two marks.

The First World War brought an immense increase in circulation for the Memel steamboat , as the German troops in the Baltic wanted to be informed. After the occupation of the Memel region by Lithuania , the Königsberg chief editor Robert Leubner had to vacate his position because he was now considered a foreigner. Lithuanian law prohibited them from being the editor-in-chief of a Memeland newspaper.

The coming out of the teaching profession Martin Kakies from Schwarzort was 1927 Leubner successor. He campaigned for the preservation and strengthening of Germanness under the Lithuanian occupation. The Memel steamboat was able to increase its popularity further and in the mid-thirties reached a circulation of 17,000 copies. For the Lithuanian- speaking population, the Dampfboot-Verlag offered the so-called Lietuwiszka Ceitunga from 1888 , with a circulation of around 4,000 copies. When the Memel area was forced back into the German Reich in 1939, the Memel steam boat was also transferred to a centrally controlled, National Socialist GmbH. On October 8, 1944, due to the war situation, the editorial staff in Memel vacated their headquarters and published the last edition in Heiligenbeil on February 6, 1945 .

At the end of 1948 / beginning of 1949, Friedrich Wilhelm Siebert and Heinrich Albert Kurschat (1918–1984) re-founded the Memel steamboat in Oldenburg, West Germany , initially under the name Memeler Rundbrief . This title was necessary because the occupying powers initially only allowed circulars and newsletters, but not newspapers for displaced persons. From January 5, 1950, the newspaper appeared again under its old name Memeler Dampfboot , but now as a monthly newspaper. In 1972, exactly 100 years after his grandfather bought the Dampfboot-Verlag, Siebert had to sell the printing company to Köhler & Foltmer (later Köhler + Bracht GmbH & Co. KG), which still prints the newspaper in Oldenburg today. With the death of Sieberts in 1983, the editorial office was transferred to the Memellandkreise working group .

The Memel steam boat has a circulation of around 3,000 copies per month. Thematically, it is closely geared towards the readership: The first pages mainly report on current events in the Memel region as well as events of the Memel Germans in Germany. This is usually followed by historical treatises or stories from the former homeland. In addition, letters to the editor, notices from the various Memelland groups, an appointment calendar and death, birth and other family notices are published.

Since issue 11/158 (November 2007), the German news for Lithuania has been included in its original layout every three months .

literature

  • Carl Ziegner: German national press in Lithuania since 1991 examines using the example of the Baltic Rundschau . Leipzig 2006, p. 53f.

Web links

  • Memeler Dampfboot , current website of the German publisher
  • Memel steam boat , Lithuanian page with digitized old issues (incomplete)
  • Information from the publisher: Druckhaus Köhler + Bracht, [1]