The Grünberger Wochenblatt, a newspaper for town and region: A historical essay

Abstract

The Grünberger Wochenblatt, the oldest newspaper published in Zielona Góra before 1945, started on 2 July 1825 as a weekly. It offered its readers a mixed bag of entertainment and information, fiction, travel stories and ethnography, poems, puzzles and brainteasers, and very soon became popular both in town (then Grünberg) and the region. By the mid-19th century it acquired the reputation of the most liberal, democratic and leftist paper in Germany. Its publisher Wilhelm Levysohn was a diehard democrat and polonophile (he pleaded in favour of the 254 Poles charged with treason — plotting an armed insurrection against the government at the 1847 Berlin Trial).
The Grünberger Wochenblatt's Anniversary Special of 1 July 1925, which came out with a record number of pages, for once outsold the top widely-respected German newspapers. In the region itself, the north-west corner of the Province of Silesia it was always the most popular newspaper. It stood by its readers at difficult moments of history, providing them with information not only about local and regional events but also about developments of national and international dimension.