The morning papers cost ten pfennigs and the evening papers cost five pfennigs. Last summer the B. Z. am Mittag raised its price to ten pfennigs, but the public refused to pay the price and in four days it was back to 5 pfennigs again.
All the larger papers have what they call a Briefkasten or a letter box, which is an information and clipping bureau combined. Here forty or fifty people are employed all day long clipping and filing things. Any one can go to this bureau or write to them and is given information free of charge. They even give medical advice free.
The large publishing houses publish books. The Ullstein Company makes a specialty of books for one mark each. They published the "Voyage of the U Deutschland" by Captain Paul König, and every one in Germany read this book.
There is one newspaper in Berlin published in English. It is supposed to be an American paper, but its Americanism was of a very peculiar brand. This paper is called the Continental Times. The most prominent socialistic paper is called the Vorwärts. It is allowed a good deal of freedom but once in a while it is suppressed. On the 19th of April of this year 3000 working men and women gathered on Unter den Linden. It was the only approach to a strike or a riot that I saw as long as I stayed in Germany. The Vorwärts was against this movement, and mostly through its influence the people went back home. The paper has a tremendous influence. Maximilian Harden's pamphlet Zukunft is universally read with much interest and curiosity. Harden is allowed about the same privileges in Germany as Bernard Shaw is allowed in England.
German Soldiers on the West Front Reading War Bulletins.
In the main cities in the territory captured by the Germans, in Lille, Brussels, Warsaw, Lodz and Vilna, they have established very good papers printed in German. Then they have papers issued for the soldiers at the front, like the Champagner Kamerad, and the Landsturm. These papers contain war news, stories, jokes and poems.
A Traveling Library for Soldiers.
German newspapers never call their enemies ugly names, and they have remained very dignified sheets. English newspapers are very much read in Germany. These papers are only four days old, and as most of the Germans of the better class read English, they are in great demand. In any of the leading cafés or at the newsdealers one can have the London Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Sphere and Punch. French and Italian papers are also to be had. American papers came very irregularly, but even yet a few leak through, and when I left in July I saw American papers up to April 30. If news in an English paper does not coincide with that in the German paper, the German reader does not believe it—that is the only impression it makes on him.