122 | Mass Media and Historical Change
magazine, the Communists founded the AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung),
which attained the proud circulation of half a million copies towards the end
of the Weimar Republic. Like the BIZ, it printed exciting, richly illustrated
reports, albeit with the difference that here prominence was given to the
oppression of the workers and the achievements of the Soviet Union (Will-
mann 1974). In the same way, tabloids like Hugenberg’s Berliner Lokal-An-
zeiger campaigned for the Conservatives by spreading scandals about the
Democrats and explicitly exhorting readers to vote for the DNVP. Further-
more, many seemingly apolitical provincial papers were party affiliated. This
provincial press still needs to be researched, although a few beginnings have
been made (Meier 1999). As case studies based on themes, photos and opin-
ions have shown, these papers did indeed align themselves with parties, gen-
erally tending to favour the bourgeois ones (Fulda 2009: 107–30). So it came
about that newspapers in one and the same town conveyed very diverse news
perspectives on any given day, and this they achieved with omissions, opin-
ionated pronouncements and hierarchical classifications (e.g. Führer 2008:
299–306).
Thus the question of how important the press was for political culture and
the failure of democracy arises – particularly in connection with the Weimar
Republic. Media often supported political participation, but the expansion
of media was no guarantee for a democratisation of societies (Bösch and Frei
2006). Without doubt the German press of the 1920s fostered political polar-
isation and made compromise between politicians more difficult. Indeed, the
latter tended to be more willing to compromise than the press, which never-
theless influenced politicians’ perception and distorted their view of public
opinion (Fulda 2009: 211). However, the political orientation of the newspa-
pers influenced the voting behaviour of their readers only indirectly. Thus the
proportion of Social Democratic newspapers was only 3–4 per cent, although
the Social Democrats were elected by about a quarter of the voters. Conversely,
the Liberal parties broke down almost completely, even in major cities like
Hamburg and Berlin, in spite of the fact that powerful liberal newspapers
dominated these cities (Dussel 2004: 140; Führer 2008: 318f.). Obviously
many Social Democrats read the leftist-liberal press because SPD newspapers
did not have sports pages, miscellaneous news items or gripping photographs.
By the same token, the rise of the NSDAP cannot be attributed to its newspa-
pers, whose circulation was only 500,000 to 700,000; yet the party received
over a third of all votes. In actual fact, the National Socialists profited from the
political climate created by the Conservative press, whose daily circulation had
grown to between three and four million.
In this context one may ask whether the Weimar Democrats did too little
to curb the media. In actual fact, there was no lack of commitment on the part
of the government, which on the one hand actively censored non-democratic