Die Weltbühne (, ‘The World Stage’) was a German weekly magazine for politics, art and the economy. It was founded in Berlin in 1905 as ("The Theater") by Siegfried Jacobsohn and was originally a theater magazine only. In 1913 it began covering economic and political topics and for the next two decades was one of the leading periodicals of Germany’s political left. It was renamed to Die Weltbühne on 4 April 1918. After Jacobsohn's death in December 1926, leadership of the magazine passed to Kurt Tucholsky, who turned it over to Carl von Ossietzky in May of 1927. The Nazi Party banned the publication shortly after it came to power, and the magazine's last issue appeared on 7 March 1933. It continued from exile as ("The New World Stage") until 1939. After the end of World War II, it appeared again under its original name in East Berlin, where it survived until 1993. The magazines Ossietzky (since 1997) and Das Blättchen ("The Leaflet," 1998) have followed in the tradition of their famous role model.
Appearing in the form of a small red booklet, the Weltbühne was considered the forum for the radical-democratic bourgeois left during the Weimar Republic. About 2,500 authors wrote for the paper between 1905 and 1933. Contributors included many prominent writers and journalists in addition to Jacobsohn, Tucholsky and Ossietzky.
Even at its high point, the Weltbühne had a relatively low circulation of about 15,000 copies. It nevertheless made a name for itself in the journalistic world, including through its exposure of the Feme murders by the Black Reichswehr paramilitary groups as well as reports about the secret rearmament of the Reichswehr, which later led to the so-called Weltbühne Trial.
Origin and development of the Schaubühne
The foundation of was an indirect result of plagiarism involving Siegfried Jacobsohn, the 23-year-old theater critic for the ("World on Monday"). On 12 November 1904, the Berliner Tageblatt reported parallels between reviews written by Jacobsohn and Alfred Gold. Due to the ensuing public outrage, the decided to dismiss Jacobsohn, whose pugnaciousness had already made him disliked by some in the media and theater. Having failed professionally for the time being, Jacobsohn set out on a journey through Europe that lasted several months. On his return he decided to launch his own theater magazine.
Theater phase (1905–1913) The journal went through several phases of development during its existence from 1905 to 1933. Until 1913 its focus was on "all the interests of the theater", as stated in the newspaper's subtitle. In the opening article of its first issue, titled ("In Preface"), Jacobsohn wrote of his conviction that "the character of a nation and a specific time is expressed more vividly in drama than in any other form of literature".
The motto displayed on the cover of the first four issues was a quote from Friedrich Schiller's essay ("The Theater Viewed as a Moral Institution"): “As surely as visual representation has a more powerful effect than lifeless letters and cold narrations, just as surely does the theater have a deeper and longer lasting effect than morals and laws.” This was an indication of how Jacobsohn wanted his enterprise to be understood: as enlightenment in the spirit of classicism. The great importance attached to artistic debates at that time was due in part to the fact that the arts were less subject to repression in the German Empire under Emperor Wilhelm II than politics and journalism.
Among the most important contributors during the early phase of the were the theater critics Julius Bab, Willi Handl, and Alfred Polgar. In subsequent years writers such as Lion Feuchtwanger, Robert Walser and Harry Kahn, as well as the theater critic Herbert Ihering, also joined the enterprise. In November 1908 after only 15 issues, Feuchtwanger's magazine (‘The Mirror’) merged with the .
As a theater critic, Jacobsohn was the antithesis of the "culture pope" Alfred Kerr. Unlike Kerr he was a resolute critic of naturalism and held Max Reinhardt's achievements as a theater director and manager in far higher esteem than those of Otto Brahm. Jacobsohn, however, disapproved of Reinhardt's turn to mass theater in circus arenas, which began in 1910 and eventually led to the construction of the Großes Schauspielhaus ("Great Theater") in Berlin.
Opening to politics (1913–1918)
On 9 January 1913 the first article by the 23-year-old law student Kurt Tucholsky appeared in the . During his first year of collaboration with Jacobsohn, Tucholsky became his most important associate.
In order to keep the paper from appearing too "Tucholsky-heavy", he adopted three pseudonyms in 1913 which he retained until the end of his publishing career: Ignaz Wrobel, Theobald Tiger and Peter Panter ("panther"). Under the influence of Tucholsky's collaboration, the character of the changed rapidly. In March 1913 the first "Answers" appeared, a column in which the magazine commented on real or fictitious letters to the editor. More important, however, was Jacobsohn's decision to open his paper to topics from politics and business. On 25 September business lawyer Martin Friedlaender reported under the pseudonym 'Vindex' on monopoly structures in the American tobacco industry. Jacobsohn commented in a fabricated "Answer": "If for nine years the theater and only the theater has been considered here, I have not forfeited the right to consider other things and to have them considered. To plow a field apart from all others has its charms, its advantages, but also its dangers.”
During World War I Jacobsohn managed to have his magazine published regularly despite the difficult conditions. From August 1914 he opened every issue with a political editorial advocating a "patriotic" point of view. In November 1915, under the pseudonym "Cunctator" (Procrastinator), journalist Robert Breuer launched a series of articles critical of the policies of the German government and the political state of the Reich. The series culminated on 23 December with an article entitled “The Crisis of Capitalism”, which concluded with the assessment: "Only the international proletariat can overcome the crisis of capitalism dressed up in national garb."
The was banned because of the article, but Jacobsohn was able to ensure the continued appearance of the paper by agreeing to pre-censorship. Transformed into ‘Germanicus’, Breuer returned to the paper in January 1916 as a commentator and, in spite of his pseudonym, led a permanent fight against the annexation demands of the Pan-German League. After 1916 Jacobsohn, who had made a passionate pacifist commitment in 1915 after the death of his youngest brother at the front, regularly printed advertisements for the subscription of war bonds. It is still not clear whether these advertisements were paid and thus possibly contributed materially to ensuring the magazine's survival. The overall tone of the magazine, which was by no means pacifist and could at best be described as politically changeable, later earned Jacobsohn criticism from among others the journalists Franz Pfemfert and Karl Kraus.
On 4 April 1918 Jacobsohn finally took account of the change from a purely theatrical journal to a "journal of politics, art, and economics" and renamed it the Weltbühne.
Revolution and republic (1918–1926)
After the initial successes of the German spring offensive in 1918, Jacobsohn's editorialist Robert Breuer moved away from his hitherto anti-annexation position and abandoned the paper's previous line in other areas as well. The differences between Breuer, a supporter of the Majority Social Democratic Party, and Jacobsohn, who was moving more and more toward the position of the more radical Independent Social Democratic Party, eventually led to the departure of ‘Germanicus’. During the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Weltbühne did not allow itself to be committed to a party course. From March 1919 to October 1920, the Social Democrat Heinrich Ströbel wrote the political editorials.
On 21 November 1918 Jacobsohn published the program of the Council of Intellectual Workers to which he briefly belonged but which he left because he did not want to have his editorial time taken up by a "debating club". Soon after that the Weltbühne began examining the cooperation between social democracy and the old army, as well as the inadequate purge of monarchist and anti-republican officials from the judiciary and administration.
In March 1919 Tucholsky defended himself in the programmatic text "We the Negatives" against accusation that he did not view the new republic positively enough: "We cannot say yes to a people which, even today, is in a condition which, had the war by chance ended favorably, would have led us to fear the worst. We cannot say yes to a country obsessed with collectivity, and to which the corporation stands far above the individual.”
In the following years the Weltbühne took a strictly pacifist and anti-militarist course, calling for a harsh reaction by the Republic to the numerous political assassinations and even during the occupation of the Ruhr urging fulfillment of the peace terms laid down in the Treaty of Versailles.
For this reason the paper also resolutely advocated reconciliation with the opponents of the war. The Weltbühne did a special service by drawing attention to the Feme murders within the Black Reichswehr. Although Jacobsohn knew that he was exposing himself to great personal danger, he began on 18 August 1925 to publish manuscripts about the murders provided by the former Freikorps member Carl Mertens.
Leading the way in the further development of the magazine was the commitment of the political journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who was employed by Jacobsohn in April 1926 as editor and lead editorialist. With Jacobsohn's sudden death on 3 December 1926, the continued existence of the Weltbühne, which at the time had a circulation of around 12,500, came in doubt.
Fight against National Socialism (1927–1933)
After the death of his mentor Jacobsohn, Tucholsky gave up his position as correspondent in Paris, returned to Berlin and became – as he derisively called it – "editor-publisher-in-chief" of the Weltbühne. Jacobsohn's widow Edith took over management of the publishing house in 1927. It soon became apparent that Tucholsky was not comfortable with his position as editor. Ossietzky therefore took over the post in May 1927 and was officially named publisher in October 1927, "with the collaboration of Kurt Tucholsky", as the title page read until 1933. Although von Ossietzky was a completely different kind of editor than Jacobsohn, the fundamental nature of the journal was maintained. From Tucholsky's letters to his wife Mary Gerold, however, it is clear that in 1927 and 1928 he was anything but satisfied with the working methods of his successor. It was only in later years that the two became closer both personally and in their ideas about the content of the paper. In May 1932 Tucholsky finally admitted that Ossietzky had given the paper a "tremendous boost".
This boost was reflected in the circulation, which reached its maximum of 15,000 copies in the early 1930s. The importance of the Weltbühne is shown by the readers' circles that formed in numerous German cities and even in South America. The almost continuous legal disputes that the Weltbühne had with the Ministry of the Reichswehr because of its anti-militarism reporting also attracted attention beyond its circle of readers. The climax of these conflicts was the so-called Weltbühne trial, as a result of which von Ossietzky and the journalist Walter Kreiser were sentenced to 18 months in prison for espionage.