New way (newspaper)

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The newspaper Neuer Weg was a state-funded central (national) daily newspaper in Romania , which appeared from 1949 to 1992 and was aimed at the German minority in Romania . There were six issues a week. The political mission of the newspaper was initially to mobilize the readership for the establishment of the socialist society. The New Way was directly directed by the press department of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party and, like all media, controlled by the censorship authority. The editorial office was based in Bucharest , with representatives in eleven cities in Romania. The collective of employees from management to correction was made up of German and German-speaking Jews , most of whom came from the Romanian province, namely from Transylvania , the Banat and the Bukovina . In the founding year 1949, the German minority in Romania made up about 2.5 percent of the country's population.

The topic

Due to the lack of a thematically diversified German-language press and thanks to the commitment of the editors, the Neue Weg developed from an initially purely political paper to a newspaper with two weekly supplements (the culture supplement and a children's supplement 'Raketenpost'), with several weekly special pages (letters to the editor , Science and technology, sport, home and family, youth, entertainment) and with other headings (teaching, allotment gardeners, small animal breeders, serial novels). The Neue Weg inevitably replaced an abundance of German press products that had existed in Romania in the interwar period.

In order to be able to maintain the thematic diversity, the newspaper management decided on the following journalistic tactics in the sixties: They fulfilled all the orders of the press department, which were clearly dealt with on the first two or three pages of the newspaper, in the form of editorials and photo reports , Reports and interviews. This tactic has proven itself to the last, as the censors found no reason to interfere in the design of the other pages.

Title, edition, editors-in-chief

The first edition appeared on Sunday, March 13, 1949. Initially, Der Neue Weg was nominally the organ of the "German Antifascist Committee" (1949–1953), an organization inspired by the Romanian party leadership, and later nominally the organ of the People's Councils. From February 1968 he had the subtitle "Political Daily Newspaper", from December 1973 the subtitle "Daily Newspaper of the National Council of the Front of Socialist Democracy and Unity". The largest edition was printed in 1964: 70,000 copies; With a German-speaking population of officially 382,595 people (according to the census of March 15, 1966), this means one copy for every five Germans. Here one has to take into account that many older people from the Romanian German population did not speak the Romanian language well enough to read a Romanian newspaper. Just like the competition from the Neue Banater Zeitung , which appeared as a daily newspaper from 1968, the emigration of Germans from Romania from the mid-1970s caused a drop in circulation (1973: 58,000; February 1990: 30,000, December 1990: 10,000). After the political upheaval in December 1989 (known as the Revolution ), the editorial collective immediately changed its political position, but kept the old title of the newspaper for tactical reasons. From January 1, 1993, the successor newspaper appeared with the name Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung für Romania (ADZ). On November 1, 1993 it took over the Neue Banater Zeitung and on January 1, 1996 the Karpaten-Rundschau as a weekly supplement. The editors-in-chief of Neuer Weg were: Ernst Breitenstein (1949–1954 and 1976–1988), Anton Breitenhofer (1954–1976), Hugo Hausl (1989–1990) and Emmerich Reichrath (1990–1992).

The performance

The greatest effect of the New Way in the course of 40 years (certainly not intended by the Romanian political leadership) was that it strengthened and maintained the collective consciousness of the German minority in Romania by reporting daily in German on German citizens. Readers were encouraged to exercise all of their rights, including education and entertainment in their mother tongue. Without this central newspaper, the individual would have learned very little about the life of German citizens in other localities and in other parts of Romania, because the Romanian press provided almost no information about the Germans during the communist era. At the same time, the newspaper enabled a nationwide exchange of experiences in German, which was essential for committed teachers and cultural workers.

In March 1954, the newspaper management held a consultation on cultural issues with ten well-known intellectuals: Emmerich Bartzer , Bernhard Capesius , Harald Krasser , Franz Liebhard , Georg Scherg , Matthias Schork , Erwin Wittstock , Alfred Margul-Sperber , Alexander Tietz , Johann Wolf . Their suggestions resulted in the program for the culture supplement, which appeared weekly from July 1954 (the program was later adopted and differentiated from other German-speaking media in Romania - newspapers, radio studios and the German TV hour). When the Presidium of the Romanian Parliament (the Grand National Assembly) issued Decree No. 81 in March 1954 on the return of the houses and farms that had been expropriated in 1945 to the German population, the editorial team took part in the implementation as far as possible. By the end of 1956, around 22,000 Germans had their houses and farms back. In the same year the "New Way" succeeded in getting permission to hold the crown festivals in Transylvania and the parish festivals in Banat, which had been banned since the end of the war. The Neue Weg campaigned continuously for teaching in the German language and for German cultural formations. The editors published an almanac every year and from 1970 to 1990 the travel guide Come with me. On the question of emigration, of course, the editorial team had to take the official standpoint. Apart from that, the newspaper management spoke out in favor of staying because it was foreseeable that the difficulties in school and in the cultural area would increase for those who stayed behind. Under the conditions of the dictatorship, an open discussion on the subject of emigration was just as impossible in the columns of the newspaper as elsewhere.

swell

  • Eisenburger, Eduard , and Kroner, Michael (ed.): The time in the newspaper. Contributions to Romanian-German political journalism. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1977.
  • Eisenburger, Eduard, and Kroner, Michael (ed.): Saxon-Swabian Chronicle. Contributions to the history of the homeland. Bucharest: Kriterion, 1976.
  • Ferstl, Lothar, and Hetzel, Harald: Germans in Romania. In: This: "We are always the strangers." Aussiedler in Germany. Bonn: JHW Dietz Nachf., 1990. pp. 163-184.
  • Fink, Hans : Behind the scenes of the "New Way". In: History, present and culture of the Danube Swabians. Texts from the 1998 annual program of the Donauschwaben Landsmannschaft. Published by the Danube Swabian Landsmannschaft. Sindelfingen 1999. pp. 175-204.
  • Müller, Annett: Farewell in installments. From the New Way to the General German Newspaper for Romania. Sibiu: hora; Working group for Transylvanian cultural studies e. V. Heidelberg; 2002.
  • Schuster, Egon: From the homage telegram to information. The German-speaking minority newspaper “Neuer Weg” before and after the coup in Romania. A comparative content analysis. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1992.