Alfred Hugenberg – the guide in front of the guide

The right -wing news portal »Nius« has often been a topic in the news in recent months. The portal, headed by the shot ex- “Bild” boss Julian Reichelt, was a driving force in the campaign against the election of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf as a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court. In addition, a data leak highlighted the financing of the portal: According to this, “nius” only has a few hundred regularly paying users. Apparently it is mainly worn by the right -wing entrepreneur Frank Gotthardt. Right figures with a lot of money that want to influence the social climate through media power is a tradition: Silvio Berlusconi, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk – or in the last century Hitlerfreunde Harold Harmsworth in Great Britain or William Randolph Hearst in the USA. The model is available as long as there are mass media. In the time of the Weimar Republic, such a media mogul has made an enormous contribution to popularizing the topics and theses of right -wing extremists: Alfred Hugenberg (1865–1951).

Media power through the back door

Hugenberg, who wanted to use the freedom of the press to abolish democracy, was an outsider by the house: his whole ideology was based not to belong to the existing system. Like many German nationalists, he had lost his belief in the German Empire when Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890 dismissed the German hero Bismarck from the office as Chancellor. The disappointed nationalists were now looking for a guide who should grow from the people and to bring Germany to “new size”.

At the age of just 25, the Hanover lawyer Alfred Hugenberg now stepped on the scene and affected the establishment of the All German Association, an influential nationalist agitation machine that could not do much with parliamentarianism. Hugenberg emerged here as a talented string puller and in 1909 reached one of the most powerful positions that existed in Germany: he became CEO of Krupp AG, which was working on the preparation of the upcoming great war.

As a lobbyist of the armaments industry and power strategist, he had an eye on the media of his time. He was looking for ways to get Germany’s fibrous newspaper landscape under control. To do this, he took the back door, collected money from the corporations and founded the “Allgemeine Advertisement GmbH” (ALA). This agency bought advertising space in the newspapers on a large scale and sold it to the industry until it controlled a large part of the advertising market, i.e. the essential financial source of the print business. The corporations behind Hugenberg’s agency did not expect any profits: what was invested in Hugenberg’s office was “special purpose” – money that should be more political instead of multiplying.

Hugenberg’s biggest coup was to bring the film company UFA under his control.

The ALA collected commissions and lived well. Hugenberg was soon able to take over entire newspapers. Only weakened by the war, then through inflation, many newspapers were happy when Hugenberg saved them. In 1927 he explained himself: “If I made inflation gains, it has done so that I had acquired weakly growing leaves to either supply them with the national cause or to maintain them on the national tracks.”

Building a propaganda apparatus

In 1918 Hugenberg left Krupp and became a co -founder of a new right -wing party DNVP, which was to grow into the second strongest force (20.4 percent in the Reichstag election in 1924). In his flourishing media empire, he not only had many small newspapers in his portfolio, and the industry also gave him the powerful Berliner Scherl-Verlag as a gift. At that time it was sitting where the “Axel Springer Campus” is today. Hugenberg showed foresight by taking over the “telegraph union” early on, a state-of-the-art press agency that helped many newspapers to fill their pages every day.

He hardly veiled that he was never a journalist, but always an undercover power politician and ideologist. Sub -complex confession in the style of the times, for example: »A really big German press can only find its crystallization point in one personality. A really great personality maintains to be a wearer of ideas. Such an idea is the national idea … “Hugenberg less disliked explained his mission in a file note: his group was” material essentially a camouflage of the mining association or mining association “in order to” build up a national press and propaganda apparatus in difficult times “.

Scherl-Verlag and Hugenberg naturally stood close to the German National People’s Party (DNVP), which with other right-wing parties fought a race for the only true guide. Many journalists were taken over from the Reichswehr, there was no shortage of unemployed officers after the Versailles Treaty. Hugenberg had enough power to put the noble Germaning for the success of his products. From 1922, his greatest journalistic success was the “Berlin night edition”, later “Berliner (illustrated) night edition”: Here photos were worked with cheeky photos and with new, red underlined headlines. HUGENBERG said: »Boulevard leaf is a sheet in all major cities in the world – not a Sunday leaf. Otherwise these big citys don’t buy it. They buy it because of the sensation that is in it – and take the politics that stands in between. «With the big city, he obviously had fewer problems than with his own journalists. Hugenberg in 1931 in a letter: »teaching German journalists the need to hammer is extremely difficult. They are too little propagandists. “The issues of his propaganda were the Völkische Evergreens:” Back to Bismarck “(or a” new Bismarck “), against social policy, for” racial history and racial history “, against Jews, against the” Smile of Versailles “, for the idea of ​​a” people without space “…

Hugenberg’s biggest coup was to bring the film production company UFA under control, with its films, cinemas and weekly shows. Willi Münzenberg wrote in “Film und Volk” about Hugenberg’s empire: “Quite wrong and the disadvantage for the revolutionary propaganda is used significantly more energy to combat the bourgeois press than to combat bourgeois film. Hugenberg’s film activity is a hundred times more dangerous than his newspapers, if only by the fact that the Hugenberg newspapers are little read by workers, while the nationalist and counter-revolutionary films from the Hugenberg poisoning laboratory are looked at by millions of workers. “The KPD newspaper” Red Flag “asked:” What should the NSDAP official shoot? The UFA gets the film propaganda much better and more sophisticated than the amateurs could. “

Overtaking from the right

From 1928 it was no longer so good for the DNVP: all propaganda used the NSDAP, whose populism was more brutal and ruthless. After a deep strike in the 1928 elections, the party split off and Hugenberg came out of cover: As a new DNVP boss, the man with the mighty white murmurzer threw himself into the role of the Messiah for the first time. It is rarely reminded today, but German nationalists had the choice between several competing revenues at the time. When, for example, in October 1929 three men appeared at the Krone district of Munich, Hitler, Tirpitz, Hugenberg, and when the Scherl newspaper “The Tag” wrote about “the speech of the Fiihrer”-was meant Hugenberg. Also in the “Day” you read a Christmas greeting together in 1930 by Hugenberg and Mussolini.

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Hugenberg never unfolded the mass effect of a Hitler, in addition to the “bred” out of nowhere, he was a Wilhelmine -looking figure, which was also a much more transparent one of the old powers than to any revolutionary departure. Even in Hugenberg’s leaves, more and more journalists passed the brown competition. The press officer of the DNVP wrote to Hugenberg in 1931: »In my opinion, the propaganda for the National Socialists goes beyond the necessary level for the National Socialists. The report by Kriegk on the upcoming election campaign in Oldenburg is proof of this. He only speaks of the Nazis, while he only mentions us by the way. Hitler is mentioned, but it is not mentioned that they spoke there. “

Hitler’s election sequence was also a consequence from Hugenberg’s, the radical further development of its nationalism, anti -Semitism and men’s craze. HUGENBERG finally became Minister of Economics in the first cabinet of Hitler-and three days after the “seizure of power” Hitler and Hugenberg went to the cinema: There was “Morgenrot”, a submarine film that played in the First World War, of course produced by Hugenberg’s Ufa.

Book tip: Klaus Wernecke, Peter Heller: »Media power and democracy in the Weimar Republic. The example of the media tsar and forgotten leader Alfred Hugenberg. Completely revised new edition, Brandes & Apsel 2023, 236 p., € 29.90