World in the evening (Berlin)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Die Welt am Abend , often just called Welt am Abend , was a communist tabloid daily in Berlin during the Weimar Republic .

It was published from August 1922 to September 1933. From 1926 onwards, it belonged to Willi Munzenberg’s publishing group , in a relationship with the International Workers Aid , which was also initiated by Munzenberg . Munzenberg was head of the agitation department of the KPD and built for the party (after the group of the German national Alfred Hugenberg ) the second largest media company of the Weimar Republic, to which other high-circulation newspapers belonged, above all the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ). These daily newspapers were distributed far beyond the communist organized workforce. When Munzenberg bought the world in the evening , the circulation was 3,000 copies. Within a short time it has now risen to over 100,000. In 1928 the circulation was already around 175,000 copies. Sensational reports, for example about a corruption scandal involving the brothers Leo, Max and Willy Sklarek , who were tried from 1929 to 1932, increased the circulation considerably. The success of Welt am Abend in Berlin led to the temporary publication of a regional edition in the Ruhr area as well as a Berlin sister paper, Berlin am Morgen , which appears in the morning . The newspaper had an extensive cultural section. On Sundays, the film and radio supplement was included with the paper .

Articles by Kurt Kersten (head of the features section), Michael Mendelssohn (film reviews for the feature section), Egon Erwin Kisch , Alfred Döblin , Lion Feuchtwanger , Kurt Tucholsky , Erich Mühsam (1925 and 1928) and Thomas Mann have been published in the Welt am Abend , Géza von Cziffra (from 1923), Klaus Neukrantz (from 1924), Maria Leitner (1929), Otto Heller (from 1926), Ruth Werner , Adolf Behne , Botho Laserstein , József Lengyel , Georg Lukács , Heinz Pol (after his retirement from the Vossische Zeitung in September 1931), Hans von Zwehl , Hugo Kapteina , Willy van Heekern (photographer) and Alfred Kantorowicz .

In the Sports Palace , the organized world in the evening on January 18, 1930 together with her sister newspaper Berlin morning (Ed .: Bruno Frei ) the feast storm over Berlin , where among other things the artist Ernst Busch , Karl Valentin , Erich Weinert occurred.

In the run-up to the last free event held on February 19, 1933, the Free Word against the National Socialists who had come to power three weeks earlier , Alfred Kantorowicz wrote in Die Welt am Abend , “There are times when the Free Word is no longer with words, but through the act must be defended. ”As a reaction to this, the newspaper was banned with immediate effect and an arrest warrant was issued against the author. From May to September 1933, the world appeared camouflaged in the evening and again under National Socialist care.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Peter de Mendelssohn classified them as "left-wing socialist" (Peter de Mendelssohn: Newspaper City Berlin. People and Powers in the History of the German Press . Berlin: Ullstein Verlag , 1959, pp. 307/308.)
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ↑ Bruce Arthur Murray: Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic , University of Texas Press, 1990, ISBN 0292724659 and ISBN 9780292724655 , p. 256, footnote 15.
  4. ↑ Hermann Weber, Jakov Drabkin, Bernhard H. Bayerlein: Germany, Russia, Comintern - Documents (1918–1943): After the Archive Revolution: Newly Developed Sources on the History of the KPD and German-Russian Relations , Walter de Gruyter 2015, p. 1032.