Advertising Economic Nationalism in the Weimar Republic

While historians regularly integrate and interrogate advertising as a visual source, it is rather harder to pin down the effects of advertisements. How did advertisements affect product sales or convince readers to subscribe to a certain service? Indeed, advertisers still struggle to quantify the influence of marketing today.

To address this question, my paper examines a select target audience to tease out the intended and unintended consequences of advertising. I investigate advertising in trade journals for newspaper editors and publishers by a right-wing nationalist news agency, Telegraph Union, in the Weimar Republic. In 1916, Telegraph Union came under the control of Alfred Hugenberg, a prominent industrialist, media magnate, and right-wing politician. By the late 1920s, Telegraph Union seemed to challenge the stranglehold on news supply in Germany held by the semi-official news agency, Wolff's Telegraphisches Bureau. While Wolff's displayed a crippling reticence to advertise at all, Telegraph Union embraced new representational techniques, using ever more visuals and ever fewer words to advertise itself, and implicitly, its paradigm of news as a means to propagate economic nationalism. 

While advertising's direct effect on subscriptions is impossible to measure, it greatly influenced bureaucrats' and politicians' perceptions of news supply. Newspaper subscriptions were actually evenly divided between Telegraph Union and Wolff's, but advertisements convinced contemporaries that Telegraph Union had squeezed out Wolff's. This mistaken assumption led to increasing pessimism about the government's ability to communicate with and control the German population. I argue that the Telegraph Union's visual language of advertising created an image of right-wing control over news supply that has incorrectly dominated our picture of the reality of Weimar news dynamics up to today. More broadly, Telegraph Union reminds historians to exercise greater caution in separating advertising hyperbole from reality, while we seek to understand why contemporaries were often deceived by appearances.