The regime began its campaign to reinvent Berlin with a crackdown on the press, which had long been fundamental to Berlin’s anarchic and internationalist spirit. In 1933 Berlin had over fifty newspapers, not including the small journals restricted to individual neighborhoods. The Nazis could not summarily eliminate all but their own organs in the city, for at that point they had only two: Goebbels’ Der Angriff and the recently established Berlin edition of the Völkischer Beobachter. Berliners were notoriously dependent on their daily newsprint fix, the sudden withdrawal of which might have shocked them out of that convenient complacency noted by Isherwood. Thus the regime, through the agency of Goebbels’ new Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda, took a more subtle tack: it initially forbade outright only the Communists’ Rote Fahne and the Socialists’ Vorwärts, while forcing other papers to muzzle themselves editorially and to dismiss most of their Jewish and leftist staff. Given the traditional liberal values and strong Jewish presence in the mainstream Berlin press, this amounted to a major purge.
In early 1933 the Berliner Tageblatt had to fire its famed chief editor, Theodor Wolff, who as a Jew and outspoken liberal personified in Nazi eyes all that was foul in the Berlin newspaper world. (As an added offense, Wolff had once denied Goebbels a job on the Tageblatt.) Deprived of its best personnel, the Tageblatt staggered on until 1938, steadily losing money. Its parent house, the Jewish-owned Mosse Verlag, which had declared bankruptcy in late 1932, passed into the hands of a liquidation agency that sold off the profitable parts of the business to well-connected Aryans.
The Vossische Zeitung, flagship of the Ullstein Verlag, tried to keep the Nazis at bay by purging most of its Jewish reporters. But Goebbels was not satisfied with partial self-emasculation. In preparation for a planned Reich-wide boycott of Jewish businesses, the Vossische Zeitung and other Ullstein papers were forced to print anti-Semitic articles, replete with the slogan, “Die Juden sind unser Ungllick (The Jews are our Curse).” Remaining Jewish staff writers, even those who tried hard to adjust to the new circumstances, were soon forced out. Thus society columnist Bella Fromm was informed by her editor in June 1934 that the paper could no longer run articles under her byline. Appeals from her conservative friends Franz von Papen and War Minister Werner von Blomberg failed to persuade Goebbels to reverse this decision. In any event, the Vossische was a sinking ship; it went down a year later. Other Ullstein papers suffered a similar fate because many Berliners feared to been seen reading them in public, and many businesses refused to advertise in them. The Ullstein Verlag remained afloat a little longer only because some of its weekly papers and magazines, especially the mass-market Berliner Illustrierte, continued to earn a profit. But in 1935 Goebbels imposed a three-month ban on all Ullstein publications, which forced the publisher to liquidate.
Die Weltbühne, that provocative and independent voice on the left, was on uncertain ground as soon as the Nazis came to power. Shortly thereafter, the paper had the temerity to lecture Hitler on how to survive in office. Ossietzky editorialized that the Nazi regime could “last a generation” if it sided with the working class and did not tamper with welfare reforms. But it was the Weltbühne journalists whose days were numbered. As we have seen, Ossietzky was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire; so were two frequent contributors to the journal, Erich Mühsam and Heinz Poll. “Journalists today gaze with envy at the practitioners of such unrisky professions as tightrope walking,” lamented a Weltbühne writer on February 21, 1933. Two weeks later, on March 7, the SA raided the offices of the journal and confiscated its property.
Nazi-orchestrated book-burning on Berlin’s Opernplatz, May 10, 1933
The right-wing nationalist press made no effort to practice journalistic tightrope walking: its feet were planted solidly on the Nazi line from the beginning. The papers operated by the Scherl Verlag, which was now owned by the Hugenberg empire, continued to earn money for their opportunistic proprietor. Yet Hugenberg and his editors were always aware that their survival depended on never straying too far from the pro-Nazi line that they had so compliantly toed in 1933.
