Monatshefte

Modern authors are dependent on journalism. Since the eighteenth century, when book reviews became an integral part of the literary market, authors have relied on critics to endorse their books and bring them to the attention of a wider audience. But literary authors did not merely become the subject of journalistic writing; they started to actively contribute to newspapers and magazines, using these media to publish their own literary works which, particularly in the case of novels and novellas, were often first serialized before appearing in book form. These close ties between journalism and literature have contributed to the more general blurring between 'high' and 'popular' culture. For writers, this development has opened up new sources of income, new media and audiences, but has also created new pressures and constraints. Journalism is a competitive, fast-paced and sometimes antagonistic field, where authors need to adapt their writing to fit the demands of a particular publication and of the more general laws of the marketplace, which are often dictated by advertising revenue.

This interplay of opportunity and constraint is a constant across periods, but it becomes supercharged after the First World War, for a number of interconnected reasons. Economically speaking, the aftershocks of the war in Weimar Germany forced many more authors to supplement their income through journalistic writing; in doing so, they responded to a veritable explosion of publishing opportunities, as new newspapers and magazines sprung up, aimed at different audiences. This surge was underpinned by technological innovations. The Linotype printing machine, devised in the 1880s by the German-American inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler, could produce an entire line of type at once, using a hot metal typesetting system, which increased the speed of typesetting by a factor of five (Radkau 226–27). After the First World War, advances in printing technology meant that high-quality images could be mass-reproduced in a cheap and efficient way.¹ The great success [End Page 147] story associated with this development was the illustrated magazine, or Illustrierte, a medium which in the Weimar Republic often catered for a largely female readership with a mix of fashion and beauty features, celebrity news and narrative photo-essays (see Magilow).

The rise of the illustrated magazine was met with hostility by commentators from across the political spectrum, who saw this development as symptomatic of an underlying decline: the erosion of 'high' culture and its epitome, the printed book. Newspapers and magazines, they worried, fostered new, inadequate reading habits: fleeting, semi-distracted, on the move, and therefore at odds with a more sustained mode of attention, which many critics associated with a more holistic and contemplative age (Duttlinger 46–50).

Naturally not everyone agreed with this argument. In 1926, Hermann von Wedderkopp, editor of Der Querschnitt, one of the leading cultural magazines of the time, emphatically defends this new kind of writing:

Zeitung ist fait divers, nicht Leitartikel. Das Wesen der Zeitung besteht im Heterogenen. Die einzige Bindung, die stärkste und genügende, ist die Frische des Ereignisses, das im nächsten Augenblick zusammensinkt. Der Moment ist ausschlaggebend, er will Perspektive weder nach vorn noch nach hinten, sondern genügt an sich.

(Wedderkop 498)

For Wedderkop, newspapers and magazines are at the vanguard of a new, more progressive and egalitarian society. Their heterogeneity is no weakness but a strength, as their constituent parts are not arranged hierarchically but simply coexist on the page, held together by the glue of the current issue, of the present moment. Journalistic writing, he suggests, does not seek to extend into either the past or the future but is tied to the present, constantly self-renewing.

In fact, Wedderkop's editorial does not quite capture another important aspect of Weimar journalism, which is turn tied to its breadth and diversity, namely the fact that its newspapers and magazines also offered an outlet for serious debate and artistic innovation. Articles published in Der Querschnitt typically included several full-page high-resolution images, reproductions of art photography and other artworks; they were not textual illustrations in the traditional sense, but part of a strategy of juxtaposing texts and images in the magazine's trademark montage style. But the publishing landscape also included more dedicated literary magazines, such as Die Weltbühne, Die neue Rundschau and Die Literarische Welt, which featured the major writers of the time, who often used this forum to first publish their new work. In addition, these magazines also contributed to the continuous self-reflection and self-assessment of the field. They contained articles on the trends and (shifting) conditions of literary production as well as surveys and questionnaires aimed as both writers and readers, which tried to gauge developments as they unfolded. Literary magazines were central to a more general 'sociological [End Page 148] turn' in the literature of the Weimar Republic, which involved a growing focus on (target) audiences, reading habits and also on the increasingly partisan, politicized nature of literary and cultural production.

While the Zeitschrift, a term which in German encompasses both popular magazines and academic journals, typically catered for a particular readership (whether defined by gender, discipline or cultural domain), newspapers had a more universal scope and appeal. The newspaper's steep ascent to the status of a cultural and political Leitmedium had started in the previous century. While in 1850, only one in nine German citizens bought a daily newspaper, by the end of the century this figure had risen to nearly one in two. Newspaper reading became a mass pursuit, and this increased demand in turn created a strong market response. Between the 1880s and 1932, the number of newspaper titles in Germany increasing from around 2,400 to over 4,700, more than the number in Britain and France combined.² In the Weimar Republic, then, newspapers had a vast influence; often appearing in several daily edition, they shaped public opinion and offering a forum for some of the most prominent writers of the time. The Feuilleton, or review section, of the leading center-left newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, for instance, reveals a remarkable and (by today's standards) staggering level of ambition in the field of book reviews alone, which often covered highly specialist, academic titles; at the same time, the Feuilleton also included complex essays and challenging literary works which were serialized across several issues. Contrary to popular critique, then, Weimar newspapers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung did not give their readers an easy ride but in fact placed high demands on their concentration and active intellectual engagement. Far from dumbing down, Weimar newspapers and magazines were at the vanguard of cultural and political debate, and while many writers turned to journalistic writing out of economic necessity, these publications also offered them unprecedented and highly fruitful opportunities for dissemination and collaboration.

How, then, to survey this thriving field in ways which reflect its dynamism but also its multifocal yet interconnected nature? Research on Weimar journalism is largely conducted in the fields of history and Publizistik (the study of journalism); in literary studies this remains an underexplored domain, suggesting that this discipline still lacks the tools and terminology to engage with journalistic writing beyond the prism of individual authorship. This imbalance remains noticeable even though for decades now, German studies has successfully broadened its analytical scope of focusing on "high"-literary works by incorporating a diverse range of popular media, pragmatic texts, visual and acoustic artifacts, and mass-market consumer products. The essays in this volume offer some alternative routes into this terrain.

As the above survey shows, the story of Weimar journalism can be told from different angles. One of them is the bird's-eye-view, which looks at the entirely of the print media landscape (including newspapers and magazines), [End Page 149] at the number of titles, their regional distribution and print runs, at subject areas and political orientation, contributors and target audiences, and how these parameters shifted over the course of the period, including across the caesura of 1933. A second angle involves zooming in on individual titles, their publishing policy, target audience, editorial staff, business model (including advertising) and material presentation and design. Third, an even more granular investigation would single out individual authors and contributions. The articles assembled in this special issue strike a balance between these different approaches, combining macro- and micro-perspectives to situate texts within their context.

This mission is reflected in the subtitle of our volume. The term 'landscape' conceives of journalism in spatial, geographical terms, as an expansive field which also extends beyond (national) borders. The assembled articles map out parts of this terrain, but they all do so via one figure: the writer and critic Walter Benjamin, who was one of the most versatile and distinctive voices within Weimar journalism. As for so many of his contemporaries, however, for Benjamin this career was born not (entirely) out of choice but of necessity. The rejection of his Habilitationsschrift, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, by Frankfurt University in 1925 brought his academic career to an abrupt end. With a young family to provide for, Benjamin threw himself into the life of a freelance writer and critic, quickly forging connections with editors and other well-connected authors. Over the course of his career, he published over 220 texts in over 60 publications, which included daily newspapers such as the Frankfurter, the Vossische and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung alongside literary and cultural magazines and more popular titles such as Die Dame, Das illustrierte Blatt and German Vogue. Benjamin's stance towards this new line of work is as mixed as these publications. In a letter to Gershom Scholem, he disparagingly refers to "das laufende Zeug für Rundfunk und Zeitung" (GB 4, 77), and he does not include these texts among the work he sends to Scholem, by then based in Jerusalem, for safekeeping (GB 4, 164).

But such remarks should not detract from Benjamin's emphatic endorsement of journalism as a tool of cultural transformation. In "Tankstelle", the opening piece of his anthology Einbahnstraße (1928), which assembles a selection of his journalistic writing, he argues that the age of the book is drawing to a close as this medium is replaced by more mobile and ephemeral means of expression such as "Flugblättern, Broschüren, Zeitschriftenartikeln und Plakaten" (GS 4, 86). He develops this argument in his 1934 article "Der Autor als Produzent," where he sets out a new conception of political literature. To be revolutionary, writing needs to be radical not just in its themes but also in its methods, its stance towards the "apparatus of production." His key example is the Soviet author Sergei Tretiakov, whose achievements include "Schaffung von Wandzeitungen und Leitung der Kolchos-Zeitung; Berichterstattung [End Page 150] an Moskauer Zeitungen" (GS 2, 687). Rebutting the objection that such projects are "die eines Journalisten oder Propagandisten; mit Dichtung hat das alles nicht viel zu tun," he emphasizes the current "gewaltigen Umschmelzungsprozeß literarischer Formen," whereby the distinctions between high and popular literature, between journalism and Dichtung, are fast becoming obsolete (GS 2, 687).

In adapting Benjamin's own title for our special issue, we follow his lead in emphasizing the material conditions of journalistic writings and their profound effects on literary and critical production. As his own publication history so resonantly shows, journalistic authorship is inevitably situated between opportunity and constraint. Some of Benjamin's most ambitious and iconic texts—his essays on Surrealism, on Franz Kafka and on Karl Kraus, his "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie" and many of the pieces of Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, to name but a few—were originally published in newspapers and magazines, and yet Benjamin was keenly aware of the restrictions imposed by these media, not least for commercial reasons. In "Der Autor als Produzent" he warns that the revolutionary potential of journalistic writing is largely lost in Western Europe, where newspapers and magazines are still "in den Händen der Gegner" (GS 2, 689). In his 1936 essay "Der Erzähler," he goes even further when remarking, almost in passing, that "die Zeitung" (a phrase he does not explain any further) illustrates the moral decline of modern society (GS 2, 439). Both formulations exemplify a characteristic feature of Benjamin's critical and journalistic writing: his combative but vague rhetoric, which casts the (Western European) cultural landscape as a political battleground between the left and the right. His reference to the 'hands of the enemies' presumably refers to the fact that large parts of the German print media were more sympathetic to a conservative agenda, but its conspiratorial vagueness also reflects Benjamin's lifelong reluctance to associate himself with any particular political camp or ideology. While this lack of a clear ideological standpoint is often a strength, it does also have its downsides, as illustrated by his contradictory stance towards newspapers and magazines, which he variously casts, as in the opening piece of Einbahnstraße, as the harbingers of a more egalitarian society and, as in the quotation from "Der Erzähler" above, as the catalyst of cultural decline. With this latter argument, which remains sketchy and allusive, Benjamin in fact taps into a prominent debate of the time, which ranged across the political spectrum, and which regarded the rapid expansion of popular culture and the mass media as detrimental to traditional artforms and modes of experience.³

As this survey shows, Benjamin's journalism is far more than an external feature of his writing; it is an experience, a field of articulation and interaction, which pervades his texts to their very core. For this reason, the dearth of dedicated research about this journalistic work is both curious and revealing. Existing studies tend to look at these texts in isolation (albeit in [End Page 151] relation to Benjamin's oeuvre) rather than in their original context, while many of his shorter pieces have barely been explored at all. This oversight is at odds with Benjamin's formal, stylistic and methodological eclecticism, which makes any distinction between "Hauptwerken und Nebenwerken" impossible (Lindner xii), and yet this distinction is in part perpetuated by the two main Benjamin editions in German, where journalism occupies a rather marginal and uncertain place. Both the older Gesammelte Schriften (1972–1999) and the more recent Kritische Gesamtausgabe of his Werke und Nachlass (2008–) editions are structured around text genres rather than place or date of original publication, which leads to some arbitrary distinctions. In both editions, for instance, Benjamin's book reviews are assembled in a dedicated volume, in both editions entitled Kritiken und Rezensionen, which does not include his reviews of plays and exhibitions (see GS 3 and WuN 13). In the new Werke und Nachlass edition these are contained in the volume Texte über Städte, Berichte, Feuilletons (WuN 14). The terms "Berichte" and "Feuilletons" are here used to suggest specific text genres, even though the Feuilleton section of Weimar newspapers was characterized precisely by its eclecticism, its formal, stylistic and thematic diversity, which resists such clear-cut labels.⁴

The same, by extension, can be said about Benjamin's journalistic writing; it too resists easy categorization, a fact which partially accounts for the fact that this corpus of texts continues to be treated in a piecemeal fashion. But this very diversity should be taken not as an obstacle but as an opportunity—an opportunity to challenge narrow and prescriptive genre categories of the kind which Benjamin himself rejected and instead to approach journalistic writing as a form of intervention, as embedded in a network of people, media and practices. At this point, it is important to make two further observations. First, as the assembled articles show, Benjamin's journalistic networks extended far beyond Germany, reflecting his international and transcultural outlook. Second, he continued his journalistic writing in his French exile after 1933, when the rise of National Socialism suddenly brought an end to nearly all of his publishing opportunities. To explore the Weimar journalistic landscape, we need to look beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of this field, a strategy enacted by the assembled articles.

Both individually and in combination, then, the articles in this special issue strike a balance between detailed case studies and an account of the wider journalistic context. As already mentioned, Weimar journalistic writing is often highly self-reflexive, as it debates the social role and professional identity of the journalist. Hansjakob Ziemer's article demonstrates that in the Weimar Republic, such reflections are often a response to the widespread critique of journalism; in its wake, a discourse about the 'persona' of the journalist emerged, for instance in autobiographical reflections but also in interviews where journalists looked back on their career. As Ziemer shows, [End Page 152] the naturalizing and essentializing categories they use in such accounts, such as intuition, genius by birth, male strength etc., can also be found in Benjamin's journalistic writings and determine his authorial self-image. Indeed, as Tom Vandeputte stresses, journalism is not a second-rate topic for Benjamin but features prominently in his reflections on major topics such as history, storytelling and language. These reflections have to be read in the context of a broader discourse on the relation of journalism and truth that runs through the nineteenth century, namely in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and culminates in Karl Kraus's model of a radically different, "originary" journalism, which is yet to come.

One of the most important genres of Weimar journalism is the book review, which reveals a set of complex and wide-ranging cultural relations when being read in context. Sophia Buck focuses on Benjamin's review of a report by the Russian nurse Ssofia Fedortschenko, which he published in Die Literarische Welt. His short text is part of his more general efforts to mediate Soviet-Russian affairs to a German readership, therefore furthering the growing internationalization of literature, to which the Literarische Welt in particular was devoted. Here, as elsewhere in this special issue, a thick description of the different contexts of Benjamin's journalistic writings generates a more detailed and complex portrait of the intellectual landscape in which he was writing. Following this approach, Kevin Drews explores Benjamin's review of a new edition of Goethe's Farbenlehre published in the Literarische Welt. Read in the wider context of this magazine, Benjamin's review echoes debates on the role of the book that are being conducted in Die Literarische Welt and beyond. Indeed, Benjamin integrates these discussions into his short text; by means of a kind of montage, he orchestrates different voices to create a critical dialogue, which he combines with an assessment of the literary landscape of his time.

As a typical freelancer, Benjamin was collaborating with partners from many different national as well as international contexts. Meindert Peters focusses on a series of contributions which he published in the Dutch avantgarde journal i10. Reading his articles alongside the program of the journal and Benjamin's correspondence with its editor, Peters reveals an intense networking activity that accompanies and complements the published text, an activity that is both essential for Benjamin's intellectual strategy (specifically his efforts to ensure the reception of his work beyond Germany) and characteristic of the relatively small but internationally oriented journal i10. i10 was the venue for only a small number of Benjamin's texts; in contrast, the Frankfurter Zeitung was his most regular publishing outlet. Matthew Handelman models the social relations that link Benjamin to the Frankfurter Zeitung, using a quantitative approach based on his letters underpinned by social network theory to visualize his place within the newspaper's networks. These analyses show that Benjamin, despite being connected to a number of [End Page 153] important individuals, generally remains in a rather marginal position. Finally, as Sofia Cumming's article shows, Benjamin's networks changed radically after the takeover of power by the National Socialists forced him to leave Germany permanently for France. As she demonstrates at the example of his publications for the French cultural magazine Les Cahiers du Sud, Benjamin did succeed in forging some new connections while in exile, although these could not make up for the ones he lost after the caesura of 1933.

The mission of this special issue, then, can be summed up via two contrasting metaphors. On the one hand, Benjamin's journalism serves as a probe into the complex terrain of interwar journalism, where he acts with such adroitness and energy. The assembled articles focus on some of Benjamin's unjustly neglected journalistic gems and put them into their wider context; but in doing so, they also use Benjamin's journalism as a springboard for much wider reflections: about materiality and media, audiences and networks, which shape public debate in the interwar period and beyond. As the case of Benjamin's journalism so resonantly shows, this kind of writing cannot be explored in isolation, via the figure of the single author working alone. Rather, it requires a different perspective, one which is alive to specific nodes and connections while also keeping in mind the bigger, constantly shifting picture. In setting out some paths into this terrain, our special issue wants to spark a more general debate about journalism as the subject of literary research—as a field of enquiry which is as contradictory and complex as it is inspiring.