68 | Mass Media and Historical Change
At the same time, the Napoleonic Wars enabled techniques of political
propaganda to take hold, with Napoleon himself as role model. In Prussia
the prime driving force was the reformer, and later Chancellor, Karl August
Freiherr von Hardenberg. As early as 1807 he wrote a memorandum in which
he demanded that one must ‘honour and influence public opinion to a greater
degree by means of appropriate publicity, news, praise and blame, etc.’ for
the purpose of achieving ‘an excitation of patriotic enthusiasm’ (quoted from
Schneider 1966: 178f.). Metternich employed similar tactics in Austria. The
ambivalence of this focus on the people is obvious: it was based on author-
itarian tactics but enhanced the status of the public as an instance through
which governments could strive to implement and legitimise their actions.
Thus Hardenberg introduced official government gazettes to publicly justify
political measures (Hofmeister-Hunger 1994: 403 and 217). Because govern-
ments feared revolt, these official gazettes were distributed free of charge and
in large numbers to the lower classes especially – forty thousand copies of
the Schlesische Volkszeitung, for example – in order to supplant the pamphlets
and warn against agitators (Böning, in idem 1992: 502f.). In the war against
Napoleon, Austria and Prussia imitated his Bulletins de la Grande Armée for
the purpose of mobilising the people by means of proclamations, statistics and
battle hymns (Hofmeister-Hunger 1994: 265–69).
This propagandist mobilisation against Napoleon corresponded with the
consolidation of nationalism. The connection between nationalism and com-
munication was stressed early on by pioneering studies like those of Karl W.
Deutsch (1953) and Benedikt Anderson (1993). Nevertheless even recent
studies on the history of nationalism rarely take the role of the media into con-
sideration. Anderson viewed newspapers not merely as transmitters of nation-
alistic pronouncements but rather argued that the consciousness of reading
newspapers concurrently with millions of others shaped the national commu-
nity envisaged in the press (Anderson [1983] 2006: 33). Moreover, the print
media were the first mass-produced industrial product to create a common
market, promote a common language and publicise maps that shaped the
concept of nation states. It was the vital media market that first enabled the
formation of a national cultural canon as a well as a patriotism that mani-
fested itself in negative ethnic stereotypes and the rejection of French lifestyle
(Waibel 2008: 163–66).
This connection between the media and the development of nations was
even reflected in the titles of many newspapers. Thus in North America some
early papers were named Gazette of the United States, American Minerva and
National Gazette. In Germany, there was a plethora of nationalistic journal
names between 1780 and 1815, like Teutsche Mercur, Deutsche Chronik,
Ponoma für Teuschlands Töchter and Journal von und für Deutschland. Fur-
thermore the media continued their mobilisation campaign with pamphlets,