Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 123print media. In contrast to the Imperial Constitution of 1871, article 118 of
the Constitution of Weimar guaranteed freedom of opinion and forbade cen-
sorship, yet by means of the ‘Law for the Protection of the Republic’ and the
emergency decree of Article 48, many newspapers were banned, particularly
during the years of crisis in 1922/23 and 1931/32, and 294 were forbidden
in 1932 alone. These bans affected extreme right-wing papers, leftist intellec-
tual satires and especially the Communist press (Petersen 1995). In the same
vein, the ‘Law for the Protection of Youth from Trashy and Indecent Writings’,
passed in 1926, provided a useful censorship tool – even against penny mag-
azines.
On the other hand the Weimar governments actively engaged in media
politics. Press bureaus were expanded and centralised, and were headed by
a chief press officer. The government still had the semi-official news agency
WTB at its disposal, which supplied it with information from abroad and
disseminated official pronouncements. In the same way, communication with
journalists was intensified and became freer. Now representatives of the gov-
ernment answered journalists’ invitations to appear at the Berlin press confer-
ence where they could explain their policies. Thus it is clear that the Weimar
Republic did not fail because it had no means of suppressing radical voices; on
the contrary, it intervened innumerable times in film, radio and press. What
was lacking in politics was the mutual exchange of divergent opinions.
Fascist Dictatorships and the Second World War
In many countries the political upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s led to fun-
damental restructuring of media landscapes. Dictatorships and authoritarian
regimes changed media structures as much as propaganda battles and wartime
occupation did. This caused the media to come under the primacy of politics,
although politics also submitted to media logics. However, no detailed com-
parative studies on this development exist as yet (see, for Germany’s sidelong
glances at Spain and Italy: Zimmermann 2007).
Researchers soon gave great attention to Nazi propaganda. The first
reason for this was that for a long time the support for National Social-
ism was attributed to the seductive power of propaganda. The seemingly
modern, subtle and all-encompassing propaganda machine of Josef Goeb-
bels thus relieved Germans of their responsibility. Yet this manipulation of
the masses, emphasised by many contemporaries and historians, was simul-
taneously a concept created by propagandistic pictures of crowds. Yet recent
studies have shown up the limits of this apparently perfect propaganda, its
lack of coordination and its politics of the un-political. The same is true of
Fascist Italy, where the propaganda system was often brought to grief by its