A prestige paper for politics and culture. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from its foundation to the present

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This project investigates the history of the FAZ as part of the history of West German culture and society. Secondly, it analyzes the role of this newspaper in West Germany and abroad in providing public knowledge and orientation for politics, culture, science, humanities and the economy. The project s first set of questions is concerned with the newspaper s strategies to establish and maintain an organizational identity of independence, even though the central journalistic value of independence remained under constant threat. It will be investigated which issues composed the newspapers organizational identity, how this identity was actively sustained and changed over time and how it was perceived. Furthermore, the project analyzes processes of politicization and to what extent pluralism evolved within the paper. A second set of questions is rooted in systems theory. These questions focus on services of the paper as part of the media system for the systems of politics, culture and science and humanities. How did the FAZ irritate these systems and how it was irritated by them? The project combines the social-scientific method of strictly randomized selection with the established methodology of media history with a focus on relevant events, actors and processes. The corpus of sources is mainly based on the rarely used digital archive of the FAZ. Other sources are the protocols of the FAZ publisher conferences, personal papers of journalists and intellectuals, and the reporting of media competitors like other newspapers and journals. In sum, the breadth and depth of the corpus of sources are excellent. The sub-projects will follow the newspaper s Ressorteinteilung (departmental structure). As regards the political department, the history of the Weltblatt is analyzed against the back-drop of the Cold War, the process of de-colonialization and the political-cultural exchange in the West. Secondly, the history of this department is examined in the context of West Germany s fundamental liberalization and westernization, including a politically polarized media sector. The sub-project will evince the newspaper s specific contribution to these basic trends and to the mediatization of these trends in order to determine the scope of and limitations to the independence of the FAZ s specific identity and to assess these historical basic trends from a media history perspective The Feuilleton is seen as a vibrant department within the FAZ that proclaims to initiate important debates, to frame them and to shape their outcome decisively. Secondly, the sub-project on the Feuilleton focuses on the newspaper s role in terms of Public History, that is the public reference to and utilization of history. The results of all sub-projects will then be combined with further research to provide the basis for a synthesis, that is for a comprehensive history of the FAZ, which is to be embedded in regional, West German and transnational history.