Whilst French influence was dominant in Germany, the Ger man papers were naturally little more than echoes of the Parisian press. But amidst the excitements of the "war of liberation" a crowd of new journals appeared. Some of these journals lasted but two or three years. Most of the survivors fell victims to that resolution of the diet (Sept. 20, 1819) which subjected the newspaper press, even of countries where the censorship had been formally abolished, to police superintendence.
A similar crop of new papers of revolutionary tendency fol lowed the upheavals of 1830 and 1848. These were equally short lived, but it is nevertheless undeniable that a marked improve ment in the ability and energy of the German political press may he dated from this period.
In Prince Bismarck's days the press bureau of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, and a similar organization in the Im perial Home Office, used to furnish hundreds of petty local news papers known as Kreis-bliitter with whole articles gratis, so that the policy of the government might be advocated in every nook and corner of the country. The numerous journals in which these communications used to appear simultaneously and in an iden tical form were the government organs to which the Radical and Socialist opposition more particularly applied the term "reptile press." Later this practice of wholesale inspiration was aban doned, but there remained many channels, public and private, through which almost every department of the government could communicate information to newspapers in all parts of Germany.
At the beginning of the 20th century the position and influence of the German press were passing through a period of change. The Germans had become a newspaper-reading people. Indeed, with the remarkable growth of the commercial spirit in Germany there had simultaneously been a change in the intellectual atti tude and habits of the mass of the nation. The German of "the great period" of i866 and 187o derived his knowledge of his own and other countries to a very great extent from the more or less intelligent study of books, pamphlets and magazines. The busy German of the opening years of the loth century had become almost as much the slave of his newspaper as the average Ameri can. Berlin in 190o had 45 dailies, Leipzig 8, Munich 12, Hamburg II, Stuttgart 8, Strassburg 6. In the domains both of home and of foreign politics the result was often a chaos of crude opinions and impulses, the strata of which were only differentiated by cer tain permanent tendencies of German political thought based upon tradition, class feeling, material interests, or distinctions of religious creed. In these circumstances it was still possible for
the government, as in the days of Prince Bismarck and Dr. Moritz Busch, to bring its superior knowledge to bear upon the anarchy of public sentiment through the medium of the in spired (or as it used to be called, the "reptile") press, but this operation had now to be performed with greater delicacy and skill. The press had begun to feel its power. It was at least able to drive a bargain with those who would officially control it, and it was conscious in its relations with the authorities that the advantage no longer rested exclusively on the side of the latter. It would be instructive to compare, with the aid of Dr. Busch's "Secret Pages" of the history of Prince Bismarck, the methods by which the first chancellor used to create and control a move ment of public opinion with the devices by which, for instance, count von Billow and his subordinates endeavoured to manage the press of a later day. The journalists who placed themselves at the disposal of Prince Bismarck were mostly treated as his menials ; as he himself said, "Decent people do not write for me." Count von Billow's methods, and to a certain extent those of his predecessor, Prince Hohenlohe, moved on somewhat different lines. These methods might be characterized as the psychological treatment of the individual journalist, the endeavour to appeal to his personal vanity or to his legitimate ambition, and only in a minor degree to his fear of the dossier, the public prosecutor and the official boycott.
The journalistic characteristics of the German press—apart from the greater freedom which it now enjoys—have not changed since the World War. The former national organs occupy rela tively the same positions, but there has been a shifting of own ership, not due to the political revolution but to the effects of inflation. During this period of inflation many of the old family newspaper owners, particularly in the provinces, were unable to survive and sold to industrialists. Hugo Stinnes, the industrial magnate, was able to create a great newspaper trust, which was, however, broken up after his death.