Spreading the Revolution: News Agencies and Politics in Weimar Germany

My paper examines the key role of news agencies in propagating politics and revolution in the early Weimar Republic. Both the Weimar state and its opponents knew from the start the importance of conveying information as swiftly as possible to reading publics. After all, the republic itself arose from a chaotic mishmash of misinformation: on November 9, the Workers' and Soldiers' Council had seized control of the main Berlin office of the major German news agency, Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau (WTB), and nearly successfully disseminated nationwide the news of a national revolution. Right-wing revolutionaries similarly briefly seized the WTB's dissemination networks during the Kapp Putsch of March 1920. Weimar bureaucrats also recognized the essential importance of maintaining the imperial government's close relations with the WTB (1849-1933): they needed the news agency’s established networks to reach their vastly expanded base of voters, to garner their trust, and to inform them of critical new rules and regulations. The state and the WTB renegotiated a contract of news distribution in early 1919: the WTB would distribute governmental news for free, while the government would pay for the WTB's dissemination of official information. I will investigate the surprisingly similar views of revolutionaries and bureaucrats in the early Weimar Republic about the significance of news agencies. Despite vastly different views on the new democracy's structure and legitimacy, I argue that Weimar governments' and rebels' visions of their target audience shared the basic assumption that they could best be reached through the old institution of the WTB; the Weimar government's "victory" in maintaining a monopoly on WTB news ensured that left- and right-wing anti-Weimar forces put their energies into alternative news networks. This had fatal consequences for the WTB's validity as the national news agency and, more importantly, any possibility of creating a cohesive democratic citizenry.