Neue Freie Presse

   / New Free Press

   The leading daily of the Viennese upper middle classes of liberal persuasion, the Neue Freie Presse was published between 1864 and 1939. Before World War I, it generally took pro-government editorial positions and defended the integrity of the Habsburg Empire. It was opposed to pan-Germanism. By 1920, its circulation had reached its high point of 90,000. It succeeded a newspaper called simply Die Presse, which got its start during the Revolutions of 1848.

   The Neue Freie Presse was widely read and respected among the culturally conscious members of the city’s middle-class Jewish community, some of whom wrote for the journal on either a regular or occasional basis. Among them were the music critic Eduard Hanslick and Theodore Herzl, whose work as a correspondent for the paper landed him in Paris during the Dreyfus affair. The experience sensitized him to the dangers of late 19th-century anti-Semitism. From 1908 to 1920, the Neue Freie Presse was edited by Moritz Benedikt (1835–1920), a Jew who during World War I became a particular target of the journalist and monologuist Karl Kraus. The latter accused Benedikt and the press generally of collusion with government authorities who wished to conceal from the public the horrors of the conflict and the sufferings of Austro–Hungarian troops on the front. A successor to Neue Freie Presse, once again Die Presse, appeared after World War II and is still published today.