The Media and the Road to Modernity | 69caricatures, and patriotic poems and songs, which promoted communication
across all social barriers (Hagemann, in Sösemann 2002: 296). Speeches,
plays, gymnastics clubs and fêtes did the rest, but these, too, interacted with
the print media. It was not until they appeared in print that speeches such as
Johann Gottlieb Fichtes ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation’ or Schleiermacher’s
sermons became widely known. Nationalistic writers like Ernst Moritz Arndt
and August Kotzebue adapted their language to the media with the intent of
reaching even the lower classes (ibid.: 283). The burning of French papers and
symbols, as at the Wartburgfest in 1817, emphasised this bond between the
media and nationalist practice.
In order to drum up support for the war against France, the publication
of nationalistic papers was permitted in 1813/14. For the same reason, the
Russian army had already abolished censorship in its liberated regions, as
had the Prussian command, with a resulting boom in newspapers and histor-
ical-political journals (Hagemann, in Sösemann 2002: 286–95). The Prus-
sian government went so far as to promote nationalistic papers like Görres’
Rheinischer Merkur and sponsor Kleist’s Berliner Abendblätter and Ernst
Moritz Arndt’s poems criticising local censorship (Hofmeister-Hunger 1994:
300–309). Some speeches, specifically intended only for the press, were often
reprinted – for example Blücher’s appeal to ‘the people of Saxony’ that comple-
mented the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm’s appeal ‘To My People’, which
appeared in the Schlesische Privilegierte Zeitung in March 1813. In this way the
configuration of the war led to a new type of communication between rulers
and people that served to mutually strengthen nationalist sentiment.
The degree to which media and nationalist movements in Eastern Europe
interacted needs to be examined in more detail. It seems to have been the case
in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, since newspapers and magazines
in the native language made their appearance at precisely this time, as did lit-
erary societies (Balogh and Tarnói 2007). The same held true of Greece, where
the first newspapers appeared in 1811. Greek-language papers published
abroad backed the struggle for independence, which many Central European
intellectuals supported ideologically, materially and sometimes even by fight-
ing – like the Swiss Johann Jakob Meyer, who published the Elleniká Chroniká
in 1824 and then went to Greece to fight against the Ottomans. On the other
hand, it was not until the 1860s that Russia permitted the publication of inde-
pendent papers like Golos, which, in spite of censorship, fostered nationalism
by such expedients as praising Russia as an enlightened and civilised country
in Asia (McReynolds 1991: 45f.; Renner 2000: 378).
In Latin America one can also detect a certain correlation between the
establishment of newspapers and national liberation movements. At the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, newspapers appeared in Mexico that strongly
expressed their commitment to the struggle for independence, and this led