Georg Bernhard

Independent activity Liberalism and republicanism Germany (stripped of citizenship 1933) German Jewish 1875–1944 → Died in exile in New York

Journalist who made the Vossische Zeitung a left-liberal paper and founded an exile daily in Paris

Left-liberal journalist of Jewish descent, born in Berlin in 1875. He began as a business journalist and founded the business paper Plutus. He joined the Social Democrats around 1900, sided with the revisionist wing, and was expelled in 1906. In 1918 he helped found the German Democratic Party and sat on its executive, and from 1928 to 1930 he was a member of the Reichstag. As sole editor-in-chief of the Vossische Zeitung from 1920 to 1930 he argued for wider democracy and understanding with France and became a favoured target of anti-Semitic agitation. In 1933 he fled to Paris, was named on the first Nazi expatriation list, and founded the exile daily Pariser Tageblatt. At the book burnings that May the Fire Oaths gave his writings to the flames together with Theodor Wolff's, "against alien journalism". He escaped to New York in 1941 and died in 1944.

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

The Exile Daily Pariser Tageblatt

On 12 December 1933 the Pariser Tageblatt, founded and edited by Bernhard, brought out its first issue in Paris. Its publisher, and probably its backer, was the Russian-Jewish émigré Vladimir Poliakov, father of the historian of antisemitism Léon Poliakov. When a conflict between the two men stopped the paper in June 1936, Bernhard and most of the editorial staff carried on in a new paper, the Pariser Tageszeitung; swapping "Blatt" for its synonym "Zeitung" in the title signalled that the line and the readership would stay the same. Together the two papers ran to 2,148 issues, the last on 18 February 1940. The staff were journalists from Berlin's liberal papers, among them Kurt Michael Caro, former editor of the Berliner Volks-Zeitung, Carl Misch and Hans Jacob.

Bernhard regarded the press as a political weapon that shapes its readers' outlook, and a purposeful journalist as a politician. He saw his paper's task as informing German-speaking readers, with facts and evidence, of the criminal character of Hitler's regime. In an editorial of April 1934 he wrote that the old liberal ideas of freedom and justice had not worn out, and pictured a "new socialism" replacing the old "anarchic capitalism" as a synthesis of ethics and economics, freedom and obligation, individual and society. In Paris he worked with the communist-led preparatory committee for a German Popular Front, and he endorsed Heinrich Mann's appeal to German-Jewish émigrés not to separate their fate from that of the other Germans in exile. According to the historian A. M. Ermakov, his paper was the most active critic in the exile press of the vulgar antisemitism of Julius Streicher and Der Stürmer.