Otto Groth

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Otto Groth (born July 2, 1875 in Schlettstadt , Alsace ; † November 15, 1965 in Munich ) was a German journalist and media scientist (focus: newspaper). Along with Emil Dovifat and Karl Bücher, he is considered to be one of the founding fathers of German journalism .

Life

Otto Groth came to Munich at the age of eight after his father Paul Groth had been appointed professor of mineralogy and curator of the Mineralogical State Collection in Munich in 1883 . After graduating from high school in 1895, he began studying economics and law at the University of Munich . In 1900 he became a journalist for the Volksblatt Der Beobachter in Stuttgart, founded in 1892, in 1906 the chief editor of the Ulmer Zeitung and two years later a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung , whose editorial office had been moved to Stuttgart in 1866 for political reasons. 1915 Groth was at the University of Tübingen with the work The political press Württemberg doctorate . From 1920 he was a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in Munich. In his multi-volume magnum opus Die Zeitung, which appeared from 1928 to 1930, Otto Groth offered an almost inexhaustible wealth of facts on the historical development of the German press .

Like his father, Groth was baptized Protestant , but as the son of his mother of Jewish origin who had converted to Christianity , he was considered a half-Jew . Although he was even placed on the Berlin appointment list before Emil Dovifat , he was ultimately not given a chair before 1933.

In 1934 his professional situation worsened because he was directly affected by the editors' law of the National Socialist Reich government: he was banned from working . After the end of the war, Groth took part in the organization of educational courses for journalists and was co-editor of the Munich writings from 1948 . As chairman of the newly founded journalists' association in Bavaria , he led the first journalistic preparatory courses in Munich from 1946 . These (by the US occupying power on the basis of that re-education phase funded) courses none were university required; they were designed to last 10 months and part-time in the style of an evening school . This made it easier for hundreds of young journalists to start their careers until the provisional arrangement became obsolete in 1949 when the German School of Journalism was founded.

Groth defined the newspaper with the help of the following four "characteristics":

  • Topicality
  • universality
  • publicity
  • periodicity

He did not lay down the material basis of the newspaper in his definition, which is still used today in communication studies . “Newspaper” does not mean the printed daily newspaper so much as the underlying “spiritual shape” of the content, which is made clear by terms such as Kulturwerk Zeitung, society's talk of the times or society's talk with itself about questions of time .

Otto Groth was married to Marie Hörlin (* 1881) since 1903. The marriage had three children.

Awards

Quote

"The news must be true, according to the facts, it must be as free as possible from the personal conceptions and feelings of the reporter, from value judgments and purposes, it must be limited to actual events."

- Otto Groth : The newspaper. Volume 1, p. 484

Fonts (selection)

  • Political-economic conversation lexicon. Levy & Müller, Stuttgart 1911 (together with Hermann Gustav Bayer ; title recording in BVB ).
  • The political press of Württemberg. Dissertation. Scheufele, Stuttgart 1915, DNB 570670756 .
  • The newspaper. A system of newspaper studies (journalism). 4 volumes. Verlag Bensheimer, Mannheim / Leipzig 1928–1930, DNB 560527330 .
  • On the history of newspaper science. In: newspaper science . 6th vol. (1931), ZDB -ID 552392-8 , pp. 378-383.
  • The history of German newspaper science. Problems and Methods. Weinmayer, Munich 1948, DNB 451688953 .
  • The unrecognized cultural power. Foundation of newspaper science (periodicals). 7 volumes. de Gruyter, Berlin 1960-1972, DNB 456823840 (volume 1-6), DNB 540005622 (volume 7).
  • General considerations on art criticism. In: Journalism . 8th vol. (1963), pp. 478-488.
  • Mediated message. A journalistic model of mass communication (= series ex libris communication. Volume 7). Edited by Wolfgang R. Langenbucher . Fischer, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-88927-161-8 .

Literature (selection)

  • Günter Kieslich , Walter J. Schütz (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Otto Groth. Verlag Heye, Bremen 1965, DNB 451249720 .
  • Ángel Faus Belau: La ciencia periodística de Otto Groth (= Instituto de Periodismo [Hrsg.]: Cuadernos de trabajo. Issue 9). Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona 1966, OCLC 715882271 (Spanish).
  • Wolfgang R. Langenbucher : Introduction - To Person and Work. In: Otto Groth: Mediated Communication. A journalistic model of mass communication (= series ex libris communication. Volume 7). Edited by Wolfgang R. Langenbucher. Fischer, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-88927-161-8 , pp. 151-186.
  • Karl-Ursus Marhenke: The periodical transfer of knowledge. Otto Groth and his theoretical research. A rational reconstruction. Dissertation. University of Leipzig, 2008, DNB 995682143 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ZDB -ID 130536-0 .
  2. ↑ Rosalie Maria Groth (1846–1925) was the daughter of the Jewish merchant Julius Levy; she had converted to the Protestant denomination.
  3. ↑ In 1945 Groth described his colleague, who was meanwhile editor-in-chief of the [GDR] CDU newspaper Neue Zeit , as a "talkative preacher of National Socialist heresies" and urged him to withdraw from public life; More restraint! Letter to the editor. In: The New Newspaper. October 28, 1945. After: Klaus-Ulrich Benedikt: A German life - viewed objectively. In: Bernd Sösemann (Ed.): Emil Dovifat: Studies and documents on life and work (= contributions to the history of communication. Volume 8). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1998, ISBN 3-11-015771-3 , pp. 3–16, here p. 13 and notes 22, 23.
  4. ↑ Otto Groth: The young talent problem in Dietrich Oppenberg (ed.): Handbuch Deutsche Presse 1947. Reprint of the newspaper section. Econ Verlag, Düsseldorf 1996, ISBN 3-430-17288-8 , pp. 96-101.
  5. ^ First published in the journal Publizistik . 10th year (1965).
personal data
SURNAME Groth, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and media scientist
DATE OF BIRTH July 2, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Schlettstadt , Alsace
DATE OF DEATH November 15, 1965
Place of death Munich