Die jüdische Presse im Dritten Reich: Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Fremdbestimmung (review)

Abstract

Die judische Presse im Dritten Reich: Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Fremdbestimmung, by Katrin Diehl. Conditio Judaica 17. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1997. 362 pp. DM 142.00. The study in question addresses an area for which there have been until now only a few studies and essays, even though it is an important field in the history of German media. As a consequence of the ghettoization of the Jewish people under National Socialist dictatorship, the authorities limited, supervised and regulated, but did not completely end the effectiveness of a relatively strong Jewish news and daily press. Even in 1938 almost 300,000 community sheets were maintained in the individual regions; they must have had far more than a million readers. Together with the periodical press around a hundred newspapers and periodicals of various journalistic types and content specialization could be read in the German Empire in the 30s. The circulation for the national Judische Rundschau orientation), the Israelitische Familienblatt, and likewise the CfentralJ VfereinJ Zeitung, which circulated throughout the entire Empire (both representing the assimilated movement), amounted to between 25,000 and 50,000. In 1935, however, the Imperial Ministry for Popular Instruction and Propaganda forbade the open display and public sale, and in November 1938 even the production, of any of these periodicals - justified as one of the expiatory measures after the Rath assassination - in order to make way in the future for the publication of the Judischen Nachrichtenblatt, a unique national paper. With 70,000 copies, this National Socialist project was conceived as a news sheet. This study is based on periodicals, surveys of newspapers, and numerous European and Israeli archival materials, as well as journalistic literature. The book Die judische Presse im Dritten Reich (1987) by Herbert Freeden, director of the cultural division of the Zionistischen Vereinigung fur Deutschland (Zionist Union for Germany) between 1933 and 1938, was used extensively. Diehl begins with an account of the history of the Jewish press (since 1675) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The account offers many interesting cultural-historical details, without however clarifying the role of this section in the overall study. Two excursuses about the Hebrew and Jewish presses contain self-evident observations or information on the level of a standard lexicon. The subsequent account of basic journalistic concepts proceeds similarly. Facts of varying definitional quality are strung together unsystematically and incompletely, without their value for the subject being discernible. …