1 - Germany in Newspapers

Summary

Chapter 1 analyzes Japanese newspapers’ coverage of Germany. Newspapers maintained civil society’s stance toward Germany in an absence of articulated policy until late 1936. Pundits praised Germany, then Nazism, and then Japanese-German rapprochement. Germans were portrayed as possessing a national character that made them noteworthy. Germany experienced three episodes of heightened publicity. In the immediate postwar years, newspapers speculated about a monarchist restoration and ignored the Weimar Republic. In summer 1929, the press welcomed Graf Zeppelin and celebrated German technological breakthroughs. After the Third Reich’s establishment in 1933, newspapers raced to report developments in Germany and often blurred the line between publicizing and promoting Nazism. Opinion makers used the remaining liberalism in Japan to applaud authoritarianism in Germany. Hitler and his messages resonated in the press because of its partiality for a rightist Germany and personality-driven style. Transnational Nazism emerged as successive journalists transformed from observers or skeptics to adherents of Nazism and advocated approaching Germany.