Just before unification last year, East German publishers were afraid that they were going to be steamrollered out of existence by a flood of glossy, well-financed West German publications. Western papers had, of course, been banned by the troglodyte communist government and blocked by the Wall.
It was clear last year that the old communist papers were going to have to become independent and change from propaganda sheets fast enough to convince their readers of their objectivity. It was also clear that a massive injection of capital from the West would be needed to help them survive.A visit to eastern Germany again last month showed me, somewhat surprisingly, that some of the papers are indeed making it in partnership with some big Western publishers.
- READERS IN THE EAST prefer their own papers, with a new direction, to imports from the West. That alone tells us something about the difficulties of amalgamating East and West. The troubles of the press also mirror the deep economic distress of the region.
Outwardly the East is prosperous. It is scrubbing up. Cranes and scaffolds are everywhere in the major cities, many obliterating some World War II damage left unrepaired all these years. Consumer goods are abundant. Nobody has to line up to buy bananas any more.
But the change from a controlled to market economy is hitting most people hard. The jobless rate in the East is already officially 20 percent but actually much higher, since many people who worked for industries now defunct will still be drawing salaries until the first of the year. Wages are half those in the West and probably won't catch up for a decade, so the East is now beginning to feel a brain drain.
- THE PRICE OF HARD goods like television sets has come down and the quality is better. But other prices have gone up, way up. Once Easterners could rent a decent apartment for $30 a month. This month the rents soared fivefold.
I spent an afternoon at the Leipziger Volkszeitung (Leipzig's People's Paper) in Leipzig. It is still the leading paper in that great old seat of industry and culture, though its circulation has dropped 120,000 to 360,000 since it was the regional daily of the leading communist party, the SED.
The Volkszeitung was sold by the government commission that is charged with liquidating the major assets of the old communist state and movements. This trust, the Treuhand, has disposed of about 2,300 industries of about 8,000 in its portfolio.
It got 37 offers for the paper and wound up selling it to a combine of the Springer publishing company of Hamburg and Berlin, a mammoth and highly acquisitive, even monopolistic, firm, and the Madsach company, which runs a Hannover paper.
- BECAUSE IT IS CLOSING many noncompetitive industries, Treuhand is not very popular. I was told that people over 50 are most unhappy with it. But I saw many younger faces among the hundreds gathered one rainy Saturday morning under the red flags of the SPD, or socialist party, on the steps and plaza of the National Museum in Berlin. Some were holding a banner that read, "Schmutzfinger + Langfinger\ Treuhand" ("dirty hands plus pickpockets equals Treuhand") and flaunting the East German flag.
Treuhand's choice of Springer was strange indeed. Springer already owned a Leipzig daily, Leipziger Tageblatt (Leipzig Daily Paper) and a conservative national daily, Die Welt (The World), which is trying to get a foothold there. A monopolies commission has ordered Springer to get rid of Tageblatt, which probably will have to close.
Springer also has an editorial staff in Leipzig for its Hamburg-based Bild Zeitung (Picture Newspaper). Bild is one of the world's weirdest but most successful scandal sheets, with a circulation of 5 million. But it has only 15,000 readers in Leipzig, where it competes with several new tabloids. These include Super, which recently came out of Berlin under the imprint of the international media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
- SO FAR VOLKSZEITUNG'S partnership has worked out fine. With its new financial muscle the paper has been able to cope with a fourfold increase in postal rates (most East German newspapers have up to now been distributed almost exclusively by the post office).
Because it now covers news instead of writing party slop, it has actually increased its editorial staff at a time most East German industries are cutting back. It also is entirely into computerized production.
Madsach sets the overall editorial policy but keeps its hands off day-to-day decisions. Both Madsach and Springer are mostly interested in the bottom line.
The editor is staff-elected now. He is Wolfgang Tiedke, a young former journalism professor at Karl Marx University, now Leipzig University), which used to supply about 90 percent of the editorial staffers. He was a communist but left the party in disenchantment even before the 1989 revolution.
Tiedke wanted to find out if people considered his paper independent and objective now, so he ran a survey. Sixty-five percent of the readers said they found it impartial.
Some of the other former communist papers, along with about 50 new ones, may find the East's grim economics too much to endure. There were 39 dailies put out by the various communist parties and social movements. Seven have folded, while still others have been bought by other Western publishers. The mouthpiece of the central committee, Berlin's Neues Deutschland, is still allied to the SPD. Its circulation has slumped to less than 200,000 from the million printed in the communist regime.
- BROADCASTING IS BEING handled differently. The centralized East German television and radio stations, which were bloated (8,000 employees each) propaganda mouthpieces for the communists, are being reshaped into two regional companies controlled by the five provinces re-established in the East.
A broadcast commissioner has been brought in from Munich to slim down the companies and supervise their conversion, under the mandates of the provincial parliaments, into independent, nonprofit, public service entities. These will be vital in helping integrate East Germany into the West and in the building of democratic institutions.