The new now : German modernists and news media, 1918-1951

The thesis explores how German modernists understood the interrelation between news mediaand the experience of present time. The German modernists whose formative cultural andpolitical experience was the Weimar Republic believed that the production and consumption ofnews media had the potential to synchronize spatially distant events. The distinctly modernsensation of contemporaneity was thought by Weimar modernists to depend on mediarepresentations of simultaneous events. Furthermore, the thesis illustrates how the Weimarmodernist conception of present time and news media depended on a specific conception ofhistory. The phenomena of modern news-media synchronicity and world history werefrequently conflated by the modernists. The thesis explores this novel understanding of present time as a series of chronotopesthat were prevalent in what I term the Weimar modernist news-media discourse. Thesynchronous present of modern news media is traced through modernist descriptions of it. Mid-20th century journalists, cultural critics and academic philosophers shared an understanding ofpresent time and news media production. The selected method reveals a shared understandingof present time and news media production among mid-20th-century German modernists. Theanalysed authors include journalists, cultural critics and academic philosophers who partook inthe modernist discourse regarding news media. Finally, the study shows how these chronotopestransformed in tandem with the history of the period between 1918 and 1951. It holds thatspecific urban settings and their news markets influenced how the modernists understood newsmedia and present time. Through this historical investigation of Weimar modernism and itsrelation to news media, I contribute to the intellectual history of the 20th-century and thehistorical study of time. My historical analysis illustrates how journalistic theory, politicalthought and philosophy were influenced by this understanding of news media and time between1918 and 1951