Abstract
After Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, West Germans began to accept the more permanent division of the country and rediscovered the regional fundaments of their federal political system. A catalyst for this process was provided by a massive regionalization of the daily press in the aftermath of the recession in 1973. That regionalization entailed the delineation of new regional distribution and advertising areas, the launch of new editions, the growth of regularly and irregularly published alternative papers and a stronger emphasis on regional news. In the 1970s regionalization cut across all segments of the market and across party affiliations and affected established papers, the irregular alternative press and even television and broadcasting. It propelled the West German daily press to its height point in German history, with more than 25 million copies per day in 1982. The new regional focus of the daily press increased public awareness of regional protests, regional identity politics and regional scandals during the chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt (1974–82) to such an extent that the article concludes that the 1970s were not only a ‘global’ decade, but also a regional decade. The history of the regional press that is presented in the article for the first time facilitates a new view of regional changes in economic prosperity, criticism of the federal state and the emergence of regional consumer markets between 1974 and 1982. The analysis provides a cornerstone for a more detailed media history of the Bonn Republic and a new understanding of the 1970s.
Highlights
On 19 May 1975, the newspaper Die Welt moved its headquarter from Hamburg to the West German capital Bonn
1 Acknowledgements: This paper builds on the results of two funded research projects on West German press history that were led by Haase as principal investigator
The article includes results of a PhD thesis by Kraiker on West German press history in the 1970s that was supervised by Haase and John Young and funded by the University of Nottingham
Summary
On 19 May 1975, the newspaper Die Welt moved its headquarter from Hamburg to the West German capital Bonn. In 1979, the Nielsen mediaplanning agency labelled these new densely populated reader and advertising markets Nielsen-agglomerations (Nielsen-Ballungsräume) These included Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, the Rhein-Ruhr region (Dusseldorf, Cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Aachen), the Rhein-Neckar region (Mannheim, Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen) and Berlin-West. After the taz’s foundation in 1979, several local offices were established in regional centres of the West German press in Essen, Hanover, Düsseldorf, Bonn, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Munich and Nuremberg.[56] Between 1980 and 1981, two regional editions of taz were launched in the metropolitan regions of Berlin and Hamburg. The SPD’s Telegraph in Berlin perished in 1972 and the SPD’s Neue Hannoversche Presse merged with Madsack’s Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung in 1973.59 The economic pressure on dailies was high They needed to appeal to broad regional audiences across counties and city districts with different political preferences
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