Newspapers and Magazines

The media project, “Zeitungszeugen” (Newspaper Witnesses), focuses on the reprinting of old Nazi newspapers and, by doing so, it has fuelled a debate on whether Germans are dealing with affirmations of their past in the right way. Whether it is the Nazi paper, the “Völkischer Beobachter”, or Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, the prickly question is – are the Germans now ready to deal with Nazi propaganda?

On 30th January 1933 there were 253 cases of influenza reported in Berlin, Dutch soldiers mutinied in Indonesia and skiers from Kempten in southern Germany won the Allgäu Relay Skiing Championships. What really hit the headlines on that day however was the proclamation of Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of the Reich. Ever since the Zeitungszeugen project started reprinting those papers from back then, people in Germany have been able to read all about it “in the original”, so to speak. Every week the media project publishes copies of historical newspapers from those times, wraps them in an annotated folder, and makes them available from local newsagents at €3.90.

It is the aim of the publishers and editors to cast a “well-trained eye over the media environment between the years 1933 to 1945”. Nevertheless the first issue ignited a heated debate on the potentials and limits of political education. The bone of contention is the question - are the Germans now ready, 60 years after the end of the war, to read the writings of the Nazi period in the original?

A row about the rights

It was the reprinted papers themselves that actually triggered the dispute; for example, Nazi propaganda papers like the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff – the question is should it have been allowed? The Free State of Bavaria is of the opinion that it should not have been allowed. The voice of Bavaria in this case carries a lot of weight, as the rights for all kinds of Nazi publications were committed to the custody of the Bavarian Ministry of Finance at the end of the Second World War. It was the Allies who handed them over to the Bavarian state. They include the property rights of the national-socialist publishing house of Eher, as well as the written legacy of Adolf Hitler, who was registered as a resident of Munich.

Since Bavaria is the legal successor to the rights, no approval can be given to print either the complete works of the Eher Publishing house or Hitler’s writings – not even for annotated issues that have been academically edited. “When the rights were transferred to Bavaria, the responsibility to prohibit the spreading of national-socialist propaganda was firmly placed in the hands of the Free State,” is the official reason. This is why Bavaria promptly took action against Zeitungszeugen – the Ministry of Finance had copies of the second issue confiscated and sought an indictment for, among other things, violation of copyright.

Academic advisers of the finest

“I don’t think a neo-nazi would find much need or joy in our papers. The myths and half-truths abounding in right-wing thinking have nothing to do with historical facts at all,” says Sandra Paweronschitz, editor-in chief at Zeitungszeugen. Since 2007 the historian has been working on the project that has been put on the market in eight countries – including Austria.

For the German issues she has been supported by a panel of academics of no mean renown. Her team includes the historian, Hans Mommsen, the head of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Barbara Distel, and the head of the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin, Wolfgang Benz. These experts write essays and commentaries for the four-page folder accompanying the papers, they review historical newspaper articles and cast light onto the political scene of those days. Alongside the Nazi press Zeitungszeugen also re-prints newspapers and articles from the German-language press in the countries in which Germans were in exile, as well as from the bourgeois press. Paweronschitz considers her work to be educationally informative, “Just how much time has to pass before the Germans are both able and allowed to delve into sources from the Nazi period?”

A critically annotated edition of “Mein Kampf”

At the end of March 2009 the first court decision was taken by the Munich District Courts. Any reprinting of newspapers that were published before 1st January 1939 does not violate any copyright laws, was the verdict. These laws had expired after 70 years. Nevertheless the question on whether the German general public is ready to read these forbidden writings cannot be dealt with in the context of the copyright issue.

In the year 2015 the question will once again be on the agenda, as the copyright on Mein Kampf expires – 70 years after Hitler’s death. From this moment in time onwards anybody can publish the book. Critics are demanding that it should take the form of an annotated version. The IfZ-Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) in Munich, for example, has been pushing for an annotated version of the original for a long time. “Published in this way, the book would be placed in the right context, with a common-sense introduction and an annotated commentary,” says Udo Wengst, Deputy Director of the IfZ. He is a keen advocator of the book being sold as inexpensively as possible. He said it was also worth considering putting an online version on the web with the help of public funding, “so that everybody can be made aware of the arguments they would need in a discussion with die-hard reactionaries.”

In the mean time the first signs of the Free State of Bavaria loosening up are on the horizon. In January 2010 the IfZ is planning to launch an edition, the manuscript is to be completed within three years. “We are hoping that its publication will be approved before the term of copyright runs out,” says Wengst.

Are the Germans now ready to deal with Nazi propaganda? “Yes”, says editor-in-chief, Paweronschitz, “otherwise it would mean that our democratisation process somehow went sadly wrong.” It depends on “How” it is to be done, says Wengst on the other hand. “I do not think that a project like Zeitungszeugen is particularly suited to educating people about history. A project that uses copies of historical newspapers with tenuous academic annotation is hardly capable of making a contribution to the academic teaching of history. To me, it reeks of sensation mongering.”