The Media and the Road to Modernity | 75next in importance was the National-Zeitung. The Deutscher Zuschauer from
Mannheim, however, was more radically liberal. This was a harbinger of
the ideological division that would mark the liberal movement far into the
twentieth century. Furthermore, as precursors of the Social Democratic
movement, papers with low print runs published by workers’ organisa-
tions began to appear: Das Volk, the movement’s main organ Verbrüderung,
and finally the Socialist Neue Deutsche Zeitung. Karl Marx, returned from
exile, became editor-in-chief and later owner of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
(Koch, in Dowe 1998: 797). Newspapers published by workers’ organisa-
tions appeared in France as well: for example, Commune de Paris or La Vraie
République (Reichardt 2008a: 22).
With the Neue Preußische Zeitung – called simply ‘Kreuz-Zeitung’ because
of the Iron Cross in its masthead – the Conservatives founded a newspa-
per intended by its co-founder Ludwig von Gerlach to serve as a means of
consolidating Conservatism and providing a counterweight to the Deutsche
Zeitung (Bussiek 2002: 63f.). Thus the Conservatives began to combat polit-
ical reforms by using the techniques of the reformers: freedom of the press
with a press of their own, and parliamentarianism with their own coalition.
In comparison with the Liberal papers, however, Conservative periodicals
and journals were only of secondary importance. The same was true of polit-
ical Catholicism. After 1815 and especially from the 1840s onwards, the
number of Catholic magazines increased. In the German Federation alone,
92 papers appeared before 1847, with Conservative ‘ultramontan’ ones dom-
inating. Articles in these papers emphatically condemned the revolutions,
identifying them with the Reformation that they saw as their root cause
(Schneider 1998: 46f., 354–59). The most important Conservative politi-
cal journal was the Historisch-politische Blätter für das Katholische Deutsch-
land, which had been edited by Joseph Görres since 1838. In 1848, political
Catholicism organised itself on all levels of the public sphere: as a coalition
in the German Parliament in Frankfurt, in assemblies like the first Catholic
Diet, in the founding of religious societies, and of course in the new media.
The mainly conservative Cologne newspaper Rheinische Volkshalle became
the leading Catholic organ in that year. Thus there was a growing insight
among Catholics that they should engage in debates on the politics of the
day to assert their presence in the media and the public sphere.
Satirical journals also flourished in the context of the revolutions of 1848.
In Berlin alone about thirty-five appeared in 1848/49 satirical papers with
titles like Der Teufel in Berlin and Kladderadatsch that alluded to the revolt
while mocking it at the same time (Koch 1991: 57–130). Now Germany
joined ranks with France and England, where high-circulation satirical papers
had already established themselves in previous decades, particularly Le Chari-
vari after 1832 and Punch after 1841. Yet their mockery of the cowardice and