TOO PLAIN-SPOKEN

Evening Post, Volume XCII, Issue 41, 17 August 1916, Page 7

TOO PLAIN-SPOKEN

EDITOR OF THE TAGEBLATT

PETITION FOR HIS SUPPRESSION,

(Received August 17, 8.30 a.m.)

BERNE, 16th August

Pan-Germanists have petitioned to suppress Theedor Wolff, editor of the Tageblatt, on the ground that ho is exercising a disheartening influence on industrial and financial interests.

[Theodor Wolff is the editor-in-chief of the Tageblatfc. Ho is a Jewish native of Berlin. His wife is a Parisian, his children were born in France, and his personal and political ideas are Gallic rather than Prussian. His energies, according to Frederic William Wile, are devoted in ordinary times to (relentless journalistic attack on the regime which the world has come to know and fear as Prussian militarism. Wolff is Germany's ablest and most modern editor, his long residence abroad having rid him of the narrow-mindedness of the average Teuton journalist. The Tageblatt has been twice suspended since the war commenced for failing to observe the censorship rules. In many respects it is Germany's leading newspaper. It is anti-Government, anti-Prussian, antiinilitarisfc, and semi-Socialist. It is the favourite organ of the North German commercial and financial classes. Under the direction of Theodor' Wolff, the Tageblatt's news and views have attained great prominence during the past ton years, not only in Germany itself, but throughout the Continent, as no other German newspaper is circulated so freely abroad, and the editorial opinions of none are more widely quoted by foreign journals, especially in England. In the days before the military dictatorship muzzled the free expression of public opinion in Germany, the Berliner Ta.geb.latt was, with the exception of the Social Democratic press, the only consistent and outspoken critic of Hohenzollernism in the Empire. Its views ivere uttered with such fearlessness, especially regarding' the mailed fist and all its works, that for an officer of ithe army or navy to. be detected reading the Tageblatt was tantamount to inviting count-martial for high treason. The military martinets and bureaucrats cursed it, but always read and feared it. Dr. Yon Bethmann-Holl-wegg, who used to be mercilessly attacked by the Tageblatt, once told a foreign Ambassador, who had casually quoted the journal at dinner in the Chancellor's palace, that "no German patriot or gentleman ever reads that filthy rag.?' A little later in the evening, the late Fran yon Bethmann-Holl-weg said to the Ambasador: "Don't believe what my husband told you. The Tageblatt's the iirst thing he looks at in the 'morning, and the last thing he reads at night!" It was the Tageblatt's

''extra" which gave Berlin its first news of the imminence of war with England on the night of 4th August, 1914. In his farewell interview at the Foreign Office, the German authorities told. Sir W. E. Goschen that the paper's enterprise in coming out with the news had crossed their plan to keep it dark until next morning. The Tageblatt's circulation is over 300,000—which is exceedingly large in Germany—and it enjoys in normal times great prosperity from a profitable advertising clientele. No single force in the Fatherland has done more to clip the wings of the Divine Right, military . insensate, .aggressive foreign policy and caste rule than the Tageblatt. Conditions impose support of the war upon it, though it has not abandoned its attitude of opposition and criticism on the censorship, the War Party's annexation policy, and the "Gott strafe England" cult. When German papers no longer have their thinking done for them by military overlords it is probable that the plainest speaking in the country will be done by the Berliner Tageblatt.]