Death of a Zeitung

One day in August 1703, "by the most gracious privilege of His Imperial Roman Majesty," a Viennese printer, one Johann Baptist Schoenwetter (John Baptist Lovelyweather), started a court paper called Diarium. Vienna was capital of the Holy Roman Empire; Leopold I was Emperor. Said Printer Schoenwetter of his paper: "It contains everything notable which occurs from day to day in this town of Vienna, as well as in other places all over the world."

The Empress Maria Theresa died in 1780, and Diarium became the Wiener Zeitung. (In England, five years later, the first issue of London's Times appeared.) So great was the prestige of the Zeitung that in 1805 the Emperor Franz II made it an official Government organ. But it remained the property of Schoenwetter's successors until 1857. That year the young Emperor Franz Josef took it over.

For 237 years the paper was a non-partisan record of events in Austria, a solemn register of Europe's wars and quarrels. The Zeitung saw the rise and fall of Napoleon, the splendor and decline of the Hohenzollerns. It published the official texts of all Austrian treaties, declarations, laws and constitutions. Franz Josef died in 1916; two years later the Imperial eagle on the Zeitung's, masthead was replaced by the single-headed eagle of the Republic.

In 1934 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss restored the double eagle, without its crown. That year a band of Nazis broke into the Chancellery and assassinated Dollfuss. The Zeitung reported the trial and death of his murderer. When Adolf Hitler marched into Austria in 1938, the Zeitung printed the text of a federal law "restoring" Austria to the Reich.

The Wiener Zeitung lingered on for two more years as a possession of the Nazi provincial Government. Last week, in a world which would have horrified John Baptist Lovelyweather, the Imperial Zeitung was dead.

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