The daily journals of Hamburg, Frankfort, Baden, Munich, and Augsburg are all constructed on the same general plan. I speak of these because I am more familiar with them than with any other German papers. They contain no “editorials” whatever; no “personals”—and this is rather a merit than a demerit, perhaps; no funny-paragraph column; no police-court reports; no reports of proceedings of higher courts; no information about prize-fights or other dog-fights, horse-races, walking-machines, yachting-contents, rifle-matches, or other sporting matters of any sort; no reports of banquet speeches; no department of curious odds and ends of floating fact and gossip; no “rumors” about anything or anybody; no prognostications or prophecies about anything or anybody; no lists of patents granted or sought, or any reference to such things; no abuse of public officials, big or little, or complaints against them, or praises of them; no religious columns Saturdays, no rehash of cold sermons Mondays; no “weather indications”; no “local item” unveiling of what is happening in town—nothing of a local nature, indeed, is mentioned, beyond the movements of some prince, or the proposed meeting of some deliberative body. After so formidable a list of what one can’t find in a German daily, the question may well be asked, What can be found in it? It is easily answered: A child’s handful of telegrams, mainly about European national and international political movements; letter-correspondence about the same things; market reports. There you have it. That is what a German daily is made of. A German daily is the slowest and saddest and dreariest of the inventions of man. Our own dailies infuriate the reader, pretty often; the German daily only stupefies him. Once a week the German daily of the highest class lightens up its heavy columns—that is, it thinks it lightens them up—with a profound, an abysmal, book criticism; a criticism which carries you down, down, down into the scientific bowels of the subject—for the German critic is nothing if not scientific—and when you come up at last and scent the fresh air and see the bonny daylight once more, you resolve without a dissenting voice that a book criticism is a mistaken way to lighten up a German daily. Sometimes, in place of the criticism, the first-class daily gives you what it thinks is a gay and chipper essay—about ancient Grecian funeral customs, or the ancient Egyptian method of tarring a mummy, or the reasons for believing that some of the peoples who existed before the flood did not approve of cats. These are not unpleasant subjects; they are not uninteresting subjects; they are even exciting subjects—until one of these massive scientists gets hold of them. He soon convinces you that even these matters can be handled in such a way as to make a person low-spirited.
As I have said, the average German daily is made up solely of correspondences—a trifle of it by telegraph, the rest of it by mail. Every paragraph has the side-head, “London,” “Vienna,” or some other town, and a date. And always, before the name of the town, is placed a letter or a sign, to indicate who the correspondent is, so that the authorities can find him when they want to hang him. Stars, crosses, triangles, squares, half-moons, suns—such are some of the signs used by correspondents.
Some of the dailies move too fast, others too slowly. For instance, my Heidelberg daily was always twenty-four hours old when it arrived at the hotel; but one of my Munich evening papers used to come a full twenty-four hours before it was due.
Some of the less important dailies give one a tablespoonful of a continued story every day; it is strung across the bottom of the page, in the French fashion. By subscribing for the paper for five years I judge that a man might succeed in getting pretty much all of the story.
If you ask a citizen of Munich which is the best Munich daily journal, he will always tell you that there is only one good Munich daily, and that it is published in Augsburg, forty or fifty miles away. It is like saying that the best daily paper in New York is published out in New Jersey somewhere. Yes, the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung is “the best Munich paper,” and it is the one I had in my mind when I was describing a “first-class German daily” above. The entire paper, opened out, is not quite as large as a single page of the New York Herald. It is printed on both sides, of course; but in such large type that its entire contents could be put, in Herald type, upon a single page of the Herald—and there would still be room enough on the page for the Zeitung’s “supplement” and some portion of the Zeitung’s next day’s contents.
Such is the first-class daily. The dailies actually printed in Munich are all called second-class by the public. If you ask which is the best of these second-class papers they say there is no difference; one is as good as another. I have preserved a copy of one of them; it is called the Münchener Tages-Anzeiger, and bears date January 25, 1879. Comparisons are odious, but they need not be malicious; and without any malice I wish to compare this journal, published in a German city of 170,000 inhabitants, with journals of other countries. I know of no other way to enable the reader to “size” the thing.
A column of an average daily paper in America contains from 1,800 to 2,500 words; the reading-matter in a single issue consists of from 25,000 to 50,000 words. The reading-matter in my copy of the Munich journal consists of a total of 1,654 words—for I counted them. That would be nearly a column of one of our dailies. A single issue of the bulkiest daily newspaper in the world—the London Times—often contains 100,000 words of reading-matter. Considering that the Daily Anzeiger issues the usual twenty-six numbers per month, the reading matter in a single number of the London Times would keep it in “copy” two months and a half.
The Anzeiger is an eight-page paper; its page is one inch wider and one inch longer than a foolscap page; that is to say, the dimensions of its page are somewhere between those of a schoolboy’s slate and a lady’s pocket handkerchief. One-fourth of the first page is taken up with the heading of the journal; this gives it a rather top-heavy a............