THE END OF DIE WELT?
Andrew Girnson says that German newspapers
are at last feeling the economic pinch: some are merging, some are shrinking
HARDLY anyone on this side of the North Sea seems to know that the German press is in the throes of an acute crisis. When one mentions this fact to English colleagues, they ask in a bored tone whether things are as bad there as they are here. The answer is that the savage contraction taking place in Germany is of a different order of magnitude from anything seen in Britain since the destruction of the print unions. The German press has suffered a disastrous collapse in advertising revenue, the worst since the second world war, with hundreds of journalists losing their jobs and famous newspapers shedding so many pages that they look like mere shadows of their former selves.
These are desperate times for the chattering classes in Germany, and it is hard not to posit a connection between their plight and the readiness of Chancellor Gerhard SchrOder to embark on the gamble of an antiAmerican foreign policy. The old Bonn establishment, of which the press was an important part. would never have countenanced such an adventure: it believed implicitly in the Atlantic alliance, and is horrified that Mr Schroder has thrown away 50 years of dogged, self-disciplined effort to make Germany a reliable ally. But that establishment is nothing like the force it was. It has fallen victim to the very economic crisis which it helped to precipitate, for the mortal weakness of the consensus politics practised in Bonn, under which every interest group had to be satisfied before any decision could be taken, was that serious reform became impossible.
In economic policy, Mr Schroder has failed as badly as his corrupt and dilatory predecessor, Helmut Kohl: it has become obvious that the present government has not the faintest idea how to create the conditions in which Germany can revive. But this domestic weakness has had an unexpected corollary, which is that Mr Schroder can tell himself that he has nothing much to lose. The temptation for him to be bold in foreign policy is all the greater because he has already failed at home. He is a populist anti-American because he cannot see any other way of being popular.
Before the crisis in the German press came the boom. The Nineties were good times for German newspapers. The economy as a whole gave cause for deep concern: within a few years of German reunification in 1991 unemployment had doubled from 2 million to 4 million, the level at which it has stuck ever since. In January, according to the official statistics, 4,623.084 Germans, or one in nine of the workforce, were unemployed and in February the total may have broken the 5 million bather. This is plainly an unsustainable situation, yet for a number of years it was sustained, and the German press was full of articles which said that something really must be done. The market for saying something really must be done seemed inexhaustible.
The boom in the press reached its height with the move of the politicians from Bonn to Berlin in 1999. From an editorial point of view, many of the results were impressive. The Berliner Zeitung, an old Fast German title, became a really excellent paper. almost Viennese in its wit, while Die Welt, a dowdy presence in the Springer stable, transformed itself into a very sharp, conservative broadsheet with an English news sense. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or FAZ, a great and serious conservative paper which one could read with the excitement of a treasure-hunter — knowing that in its grand manner it would sometimes throw away a scoop in the 27th paragraph of a story — unbent so far as to launch its Berlin Pages, a supplement distributed only in Berlin which offered an amusing daily commentary on life in the capital. Everyone did something, yet they were all competing for a market of a mere 3.5 million far from affluent Berliners, who had ten daily papers to choose from and were further divided into easterners and westerners, who would not read each others' titles.
Even so, for a short time it seemed that Germany might develop a genuine national press, rather on the Fleet Street model, instead of being a country divided, as its histo ry and federal structure would lead one to expect, between a number of powerful regional papers. Then in 2001 the advertising slump set in. The FAZ, which used to carry 100 pages of jobs ads on Saturdays and would hold others over for lack of space, is lucky now to get half that. It has had two rounds of job cuts, of 20 per cent each time, and has scrapped the Berlin Pages, which were found to have attracted a mere 2,000 extra readers. The lavish staff of 12 permanent and 20 freelance journalists who produced those pages have been laid off. So have such luminaries as Elfie Sieg,l, the paper's renowned expert on the Russian economy.
It is almost prohibitively expensive to sack long-serving staff in Germany, so some of the old stagers on the FAZ were asked if they would take early retirement in order to safeguard the careers of younger colleagues. But the old stagers said no. German labour law has thus ensured that on this and other papers the generation of journalists under the age of 40 has been thrown out of work.
The FAZ's remaining staff have been told that they have only two years to turn the paper round, but they wonder how they are to do this if German business is so devoid of confidence and so strapped for cash that it will no longer spend money on advertising. Many fear that the Saturday jobs ads, the paper's gold mine, will never come back, or will find a new home on the Internet. The latest news is that the staff may lose their company cars. 'That would be a tremendous blow to us all,' one of the staff said, for the cars are regarded as a valuable supplement to the relatively modest salaries paid by the paper.
The same story is repeated on other papers. The liberal Sitddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, has undergone cuts as harrowing as the FAZ's, while the liberal Frankfurter Rundschau's prospects are bleak. Die Welt has made radical savings by merging with the Berliner Motgenpost, so that one staff produce two papers each day. Some of the regional newspapers remain strong, but those with national aspirations have suffered grievously.
The complacency and inflexibility which characterised parts of the German press have been destroyed. German journalists no longer have jobs for life. Twelve years after reunification, the leisured ways of the press that served the old Bonn Republic have passed into history.
The foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, who is the one outstanding talent in a cabinet of mediocrities, treats the German press with disdain. He treats everyone with disdain when it suits him, and has surprised and infuriated the Americans by conjuring up a coalition of France, Germany, Russia and China against them: he is not a man to do things by halves. He entered politics as a pacifist, yet the moment he became foreign minister in 1998 he was bounced by the Americans into supporting the bombing of Kosovo. He will never again allow himself to be bounced by them. We shall have to get used to a new Germany, which is economically incompetent, but seeks to compensate for that incompetence by adopting a high moral tone.
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