Death of Auntie Voss

When the Nazis pried the great Liberal Jewish family of Ullstein loose from its 56-year-old publishing house last November, the Vossichc Zeitung, the family's greatest newspaper, somehow managed to survive. Older by 173 years than the House of Ullstein which took it over in 1914, 229 years older than Nazidom, as dignified as the London or the New York Times but far more venerable, the Vossiche Zeitung was "Auntie Voss" to Berliners. It had reported the battles of Frederick the Great and Napoleon, the rise of Bismarck and the rise of Hitler. Toward Handsome Adolf its attitude was one of disgusted scorn, until he came into power and threw the Nazi blanket over "Auntie Voss' " head. That blanket has suffocated 600 German newspapers. In Hamburg alone four papers gave up last week. And in Berlin "Auntie Voss" expired too, with one last muffled peep.

In the dead silence of the German Press, the concussion of that feeble peep hit all Germany. The editors wanted to say something but they did not want to go to jail. They got into print the phrases with which every Liberal German editor has been bursting by saying the opposite of what they meant: "The pendulum has swung from unbridled freedom of expression to occasional overdiscipline. In particular it did not seem necessary to us to keep from the German reader news that he could read in foreign newspapers, at times in the grossest exaggeration and misrepresentation. The complete outlawing of certain topics of discussion seems also but a transitional check. . . . Our death should not be interpreted as a symptom of a development the end of which would be a standardized newspaper for every German."

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