Competition and Transfer in the Feuilleton of the Interwar Period: The Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung between Vienna and Berlin

In 1923 Joseph Roth published his first novel Das Spinnennetz in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung. The novel is regarded as an example of the rising importance of this newspaper in the German speaking feuilleton after World War I. The setting of Roth’s novel is not Vienna, but Berlin, the city considered the literary and journalistic center of the Weimar period. It is also the city the Viennese author Roth moves to in 1923 to continue his career as writer and journalist. Roth became known primarily for his novels and his Berlin feuilleton for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Roth’s career may describe the triangle Vienna/Berlin/Frankfurt as competing centers of newspaper feuilletons of the interwar period. The presentation will trace these relationships, with a focus on the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung (AZ). The rise of the AZ’s literary feuilleton will be examined in distinction to the competing bourgeois feuilleton of the Wiener Neue Freie Presse and the Frankfurter Zeitung on the one hand, and in relation to the literary center of Berlin on the other. From 1919 until its prohibition in 1934, the AZ developed a highly regarded literary feuilleton characterized by innovative formats and a programmatic orientation toward European and American modernism as well as a new realism. With its strategic orientation, the AZ set itself apart from its bourgeois rival, the Neue Freie Presse, whose feuilleton was anchored above all in the newspaper culture of Viennese modernism around 1900. At the same time, the AZ operates in a network with Berlin’s publishing and newspaper culture. The presentation will analyze the programmatic orientation and strategic development of AZ feuilleton with regard to these transfer relations.