Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 121conservative party (the DNVP) as well, he represented a new and far-reach-
ing union of politics and the media. The structure of his media empire has
been well researched (Holzbach 1981; Gossel 2009), but the contents and
effects of his media per se have not been studied in such detail. The press divi-
sion of the ‘Hugenberg System’ had a fivefold foundation: its own advertising
agencies, for example the Ala (Allgemeine Anzeigen GmbH); its news agency
Telegrafen-Union; the Scherl publishing house (which Hugenberg purchased)
as well as other newspapers; the Materndienst (matrix service) of the ‘Wipro’
(economic base for the provincial press), which provided about three hundred
provincial publishers with paper-maché matrices of articles from various polit-
ical persuasions; and the Vera-Verlagsanstalt Ltd., which offered financial assis-
tance to newspapers. Hugenberg’s companies took advantage of the economic
weaknesses of smaller papers in order to exert political influence. In addition
to Conservative manuscripts he also sold matrices from centrist and non-par-
tisan sources, in order to unite the entire ‘bourgeois camp’ under his roof
and maximise his profits. His own right-wing party profited from his media
empire, but so also did the Nazis.
Also tabloid journalism increased its circulation in many Western coun-
tries. In the United States, where tabloid journalism had indeed been estab-
lished since the 1880s, the year 1926 is considered the ‘climax year of the
war of the tabloids’, that battled for circulation records with sensational
photos and stories, especially in New York (Emery and Emery 1988: 326). In
Germany, a real sensational press finally came up in these years. Although the
party-affiliated press continued to be characteristic of Germany and France,
it began to lose importance after the mid-1920s. In Berlin the circulation of
party organs sank by about 20 per cent during the second half of the 1920s,
while that of the tabloids trebled (Charle 2004: 247–66; Fulda 2009: 22f.).
Simultaneously the dividing lines between popular and party press became
blurred in Germany.
The circulation of German newspapers, which had dropped during the
war, climbed back up to their previous numbers, reaching an estimated 18
million copies by 1932, despite the economic crisis; however, two-thirds of
these newspapers had small print runs of under five thousand (Dussel 2004:
129). Job advertisements, increased reading time and withdrawal into private
life contributed to this stability during the crisis as much as changes in press
content. While other countries were dominated by the press of their capitals,
in Germany a truly national press market was still evident only in periodicals
and hardly at all in the daily newspapers, with the exception of a few small,
supra-regional party organs. And most journalists continued to see themselves
as educators and not so much as neutral informers.
This was also true for the popular press. After the liberal BIZ (Berliner
Illustrierte Zeitung) had established itself as Germany’s most popular illustrated