Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

IV GERMAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE PRESS

In the days when Bismarck was welding the German states into a federal organization and finally into an empire, he used the press to spray his opinions, wishes, and suspicions over those he wished to instruct or to influence. He used it, too, to threaten or to mislead his enemies at home and abroad. The Hamburger Nachrichten was the newspaper for which he wrote at one time, and which remained his confidential organ, though as his power grew he used other journals and journalists as well.

As Germany has few traditions of freedom, having rarely won liberty as a united people, but having been beaten into national unity by her political giants, or her robuster sovereigns, so the press before and during Bismarck’s long reign, from 1862 to 1890, was kept well in hand by those who ruled. It is only lately that caricature, criticism, and opposition have had freer play. That a journalist like Maximilian Harden (a friend and confidant of Bismarck, by the way) should be permitted to write without rebuke and without punishment that the present Kaiser “has all the gifts except one, that of politics,” marks a new license in journalistic debate. That this same person was able, single-handed, to bring about the exposure and downfall of a cabal of decadent courtiers whose influence with the Emperor was deplored, proves again how completely the German press has escaped from certain leading-strings. A sharp criticism of the Emperor in die Post, even as lately as 1911, excited great interest, and was looked upon as a very daring performance.

There are some four thousand daily and more than three thousand weekly and monthly publications in Germany to-day; but neither the press as a whole, nor the journalists, with a few exceptions, exert the influence in either society or politics of the press in America and in England. As compared with Germany, one is at once impressed with the greater number of journals and their more effective distribution at home. In America there are 2,472 daily papers; 16,269 weeklies; and 2,769 monthlies. Tri-weekly and quarterly publications added bring the total to 22,806. One group of 200 daily papers claim a circulation of 10,000,000, while five magazines have a total circulation of 5,000,000. It is calculated that there is a daily, a weekly, and a monthly magazine circulated for every single family in America. Not an unmixed blessing, by any means, when one remembers that thousands, untrained to think and uninterested, are thus dusted with the widely blown comments of undigested news. Editorial comment of any serious value is, of course, impossible, and the readers are given a strange variety of unwholesome intellectual food to gulp down, with mental dyspepsia sure to follow, a disease which is already the curse of the times in America, where superficiality and insincerity are leading the social and political dance.

To carry the comparison further, there are 22,806 newspapers published in America; 9,500 in England; 8,049 in Germany; and 6,681 in France: or 1 for every 4,100 of the population in America; 1 for every 4,700 in Great Britain; 1 for every 7,800 in Germany, and 1 for every 5,900 in France.

That a prime minister should have been a contributor to the press, as was Lord Salisbury; that a correspondent or editorial writer of a newspaper should find his way into cabinet circles, into diplomacy, or into high office in the colonies; that the editor and owner of a great newspaper should become an ambassador to England, as in the case of Mr. Reid, is impossible in Germany. The character of the men who take up the profession of journalism suffers from the lack of distinction and influence of their task. Raymond, Greeley, Dana, Laffan, Godkin, in America, and Delane, Hutton, Lawson, and their successors, Garvin, Strachey, Robinson, in England, are impossible products of the German journalistic soil at present.

There have been great changes, and the place of the newspaper and the power of the journalist is increasing rapidly, but the stale atmosphere of censordom hangs about the press even to-day. Freedom is too new to have bred many powerful pens or personalities, and the inconclusive results of political arguments, written for a people who are comparatively apathetic, lessen the enthusiasm of the political journalist. There are not three editors in Germany who receive as much as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence. I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but certainly solvency makes for emancipation from the more debasing forms of tyranny.

Several of the more popular newspapers are owned and controlled by the Jews, and to the American, with no inborn or traditional prejudice against the Jews as a race, it is somewhat difficult to understand the outspoken and unconcealed suspicion and dislike of them in Germany. There is no need to mince matters in stating that this suspicion and dislike exist. A comedy called “The Five Frankfurters” has been given in all the principal cities during the last year and has had a long run in Berlin. It is a scathing caricature of certain Jewish peculiarities of temperament and ambition.

There is even an anti-semitic party, small though it be, in the Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the German corps in the universities, no Jew can hold office of importance in the state, and I presume that no unbaptized Jew is received at court. I am bound to record my personal preference for the English and American treatment of the Jew. In England they have made a Jew their prime minister, and in America we offer him equal opportunities with other men, and applaud him whole-heartedly when he succeeds, and thump him soundly with our criticism when he misbehaves. The German fears him; we do not. We have made Jews ambassadors, they have served in our army and navy, and not a few of them rank among our sanest and most generous philanthropists.

To a certain extent society of the higher and official class shuts its doors against him. One of the well-known restaurants in Berlin, until the death of its founder, not long ago, refused admission to Jews.