News From Germany

Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad. Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news. News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.

News from Germany traces why Germans became interested in international communications around 1900 and how they sought to control it for the next 45 years. They used new communications technologies, like wireless and radio, and they used the central businesses of news supply - news agencies. An astonishing array of German politicians, industrialists, military generals, and journalists became obsessed with news. At home, a news agency helped to start the Weimar Republic; competition over news agencies helped to usher in the Weimar Republic's demise. Abroad, news from Germany reached around the world and was surprisingly successful in places as far-flung as China and Chile. Although news is often seen as part of soft power, Germans used it to achieve hard power aims. Communications infrastructure and information became crucial parts of power politics. The Nazis seemed to be the master propagandists, but their efforts built on decades of German obsessions with news.--

"Through his broadcasts for Edward R. Murrow on CBS Radio, William Shirer was a masterful chronicler of the events in Europe that led up to World War II." "The reportage in "This Is Berlin" offers rich insights into the period before the darkest days descended and World War II began. With chilling immediacy, these broadcasts take the reader to the front, providing flashpoints of the imminent war in the words of America's most trusted correspondent. An introduction by noted historian John Keegan and a preface by Shirer's daughter, Inga Shirer Dean, serve to put Shirer's life and work into context."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Jan Hillgärtner traces the development and spread of the newspaper and the development of the printing industry around it in the Holy Roman Empire in the first half of the seventeenth century.

"News in Times of Conflict traces the development and spread of the newspaper and the development of the printing industry in Germany in the first half of the seventeenth century. Based on an inspection of all printed newspapers of this period, the book offers an overview over the regional and thematic reporting and the development of journalistic styles and ethics. It offers an examination of the coverage of two major events: the death of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, and the execution of King Charles I of England. These case studies provide the opportunity for a comparison with the newspaper markets in France, England and the Low Countries, and with the provision of news through manuscript newsletters"--

'Red Saxony' reappraises Germany's prospects for democratic governance from the mid-19th century to the collapse of the Second Reich, asking: how was Germany governed in the era of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II? How did fear of revolution push liberal and conservative parties together? How did Germany's leaders see their nation's future?