scholarly journals „Heute keine Sitzung wegen zu teuren Bieres!“: Die Analyse des Bamberger Bierkriegs von 1907 als Thema der Öffentlichkeit

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Kast

Oktober 1907: In Bamberg herrscht ein unerbittliches Ringen um die Vorherrschaft über den Preis für das populäre Gesellschaftsgetränk Bier. Die Hersteller wollen den Gerstensaft stadtweit um zwei Pfennige pro Liter erhöhen, das trinkfreudige Publikum sieht das anders und rebelliert. Den anschließenden „Bierkrieg“ tragen verschiedenste Konfliktparteien aus – Brauer und Biertrinker, Wirte und Zeitungen. Und dennoch bleibt er ein Krieg ohne Schwertstrich und Blutvergießen. Vielmehr setzt die Antibierpreisbewegung auf Boykott und Protest und erreicht nach nur sieben Tagen eine Abkehr von der Verteuerung. Der im vorliegenden Buch behandelte „Bamberger Bierkrieg“ versinnbildlicht, wie sich öffentliche Prozesse zu Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts in einer deutschen Kleinstadt abspielten, welche Personen auf welchen Öffentlichkeitsebenen agierten, wie sich Proteste zu einer Bewegung formten und nicht zuletzt, welch hohen Stellenwert die Presse als einziges periodisches Massenmedium innerhalb der öffentlichen Kommunikation anno 1907 besaß. October 1907: In Bamberg, there is a relentless struggle for supremacy over the price of the beer. The producers want to raise the price by two pfennigs per liter in the city, but the public, which loves to drink, sees things differently and rebels. The "Bambergian Beer War" was fought by a variety of parties - beer brewers and beer drinkers, pub owners and the press. Nevertheless, it remains a war without swordplay and bloodshed. The anti-beer price movement relies much more on boycotts and protests and achieves a reversal of the price increase after only seven days. The "Bambergian Beer War" examined in this book symbolizes how public processes worked in a small German town at the beginning of the 20th century, which people acted at which levels in the public sphere, how protests formed a movement and what influence the press had as the only periodic mass medium within public communication in 1907. Der im vorliegenden Buch behandelte „Bamberger Bierkrieg“ versinnbildlicht, wie sich öffentliche Prozesse zu Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts in einer deutschen Kleinstadt abspielten, welche Personen auf welchen Öffentlichkeitsebenen agierten, wie sich Proteste zu einer Bewegung formten und nicht zuletzt, welch hohen Stellenwert die Presse als einziges periodisches Massenmedium innerhalb der öffentlichen Kommunikation anno 1907 besaß.

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Jani Marjanen ◽  
Ville Vaara ◽  
Antti Kanner ◽  
Hege Roivainen ◽  
Eetu Mäkelä ◽  
...  

This article uses metadata from serial publications as a means of modelling the historical development of the public sphere. Given that a great deal of historical knowledge is generated through narratives relying on anecdotal evidence, any attempt to rely on newspapers for modeling the past challenges customary approaches in political and cultural history. The focus in this article is on Finland, but our approach is also scalable to other regions. During the period 1771–1917 newspapers developed as a mass medium in the Grand Duchy of Finland within two imperial configurations (Sweden until 1809 and Russia in 1809–1917), and in the two main languages – Swedish and Finnish. Finland is an ideal starting point for conducting comparative studies in that its bilingual profile already includes two linguistically separated public spheres that nonetheless were heavily connected. Our particular interest here is in newspaper metadata, which we use to trace the expansion of public discourse in Finland by statistical means. We coordinate information on publication places, language, number of issues, number of words, newspaper size, and publishers, which we compare with existing scholarship on newspaper history and censorship, and thereby offer a more robust statistical analysis of newspaper publishing in Finland than has previously been possible. We specifically examine the interplay between the Swedish- and Finnish-language newspapers and show that, whereas the public discussions were inherently bilingual, the technological and journalistic developments advanced at different pace in the two language forums. This analysis challenges the perception of a uniform public sphere in the country. In addition, we assess the development of the press in comparison with the production of books and periodicals, which points toward the specialization of newspapers as a medium in the period after 1860. This confirms some earlier findings about Finnish print production. We then show how this specialization came about through the establishment of forums for local debates that other less localized print media such as magazines and books could not provide.


Author(s):  
Stephen Lovell

This chapter tells the story of public speaking in Russia from the imposition of greater restrictions on the public sphere in 1867 through to the eve of Alexander II’s assassination in 1881. It shows that in this period the focus of the Russian public switched from the zemstvo to the courtroom, where a number of high-profile trials took place (and were reported, sometimes in stenographic detail, in the press). The chapter examines the careers and profiles of some of Russia’s leading courtroom orators. It also explores the activities of the Russian socialists (populists), in particular the ‘Going to the People’ movement of 1873–4 and later propaganda efforts in the city and the courtroom. It ends by considering the intensification of public discourse at the end of the 1870s: the Russo-Turkish War saw a surge of patriotic mobilization, but at the same time the populist adoption of terrorism seized public attention.


2014 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vibodh Parthasarathi

This article provides a pathway to engage with the enabling environment of public communication in India. It scrutinises debates around press policy in the first four decades after Independence (1950–90) to reveal the trajectory of contests between dominant strands of liberal and progressive standpoints. This will help unravel the constituted contexts of the public sphere of marketed print in pre-liberalisation India. The central interest in doing so is to illustrate how and argue why the value of media diversity, unlike those of media freedom and media autonomy, failed to become a core concern in debates on press policy. The ways in which this inheritance pre-determined the perimeters of policy options during media deregulation of the 1990s may be worth exploring further.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Fabiszak ◽  
Marta Gruszecka ◽  
Anna Weronika Brzezińska

This article is devoted to the question of the recontextualization of populist topoi in the public sphere. Recontextualization is a process by which a change in the author, recipient, or context of a communication alters its meaning. Populism is understood as a discursive strategy in reference to a limited number of topoi, such as values (for in stance, freedom); criticism of authority; appeals to emotions (for example, the sense of threat and fear); and reference to national identity and history to obtain social support. The authors of the article analyze how these topoi change during their flow between various channels of communication: the internet forum of the Lech Poznań fan club, the local press (Głos Wielkopolski and a local supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza), the blog of the city mayor, and the facebook page of a municipal official. The research, based on a historical, critical analysis of the discourse, shows that when the press and local politicians’ discuss topics with the fan forum, the result is the legitimation of the fan forum’s position and its broader effect in the public sphere.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Gerardo Serra ◽  
Morten Jerven

Abstract This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses the role of the press in constructing the meaning and implications of the 1963 count. In contrast with the literature's emphasis on identification, categorization, and enumeration, our focus is on how the census results informed a broader range of visual and textual narratives. It is argued that analysing the multiple ways in which demographic sources shape debates about trust, identity, and the state in the public sphere results in a richer understanding of the politics of counting people and narrows the gap between demographic and cultural history.


Author(s):  
Luís Guilherme Nascimento de Araujo ◽  
Claudio Everaldo Dos Santos ◽  
Elizabeth Fontoura Dorneles ◽  
Ionathan Junges ◽  
Nariel Diotto ◽  
...  

The political and economic crises faced today, evidenced by the manifestos of political parties and the texts published in social networks and in the press, point to Brazilian society the possibility of different directions, including that of an autocratic regime, with the return of the military to the public sphere. This article discusses the movements of acceptance and resistance to the military regime that was implemented in Brazil with the coup of 1964. It is observed that the military uprising received at that time the support of a large part of the Brazilian population, which sought ways to maintain its socioeconomic status to the detriment of a majority that perceived itself vulnerable in view of the forms of maintenance and expansion of power used by the regime. In this context, Tropicalism emerges as an example of a contesting movement. This text approaches the song "Culture and civilization" by Gilberto Gil, performed by Gal Costa, relating the ideas present in this composition with the understandings of politics and culture, in a multidisciplinary proposal, seeking to understand the resistance and counter-resistance movements that emerged in Brazil at the time.


Author(s):  
Yuliya Kuzovenkova ◽  

The last two decades have been a time of serious transformation of youth subcultures. Researchers speak about the formation of the postmodernism paradigm of subculture and the virtualisation of sociocultural phenomena. The subcultural subject and the power that formed it continue to exist in the new realities, but are undergoing a transformation. Changes having occured to the public sphere were especially significant for a subcultural entity since it is the public sphere where a subcultural entity can present itself to authorities, thereby maintaining its social subsistence. Our research was aimed at studying how the transformation of the public sphere has affected the entity’s subculture. For the study, the authors employed the method of a qualitative half-structurated interview and draw on the disciplinary authority concept suggested by M. Foucault. The analysis was based on materials of interviewing some representatives of the graffiti subculture in the city of Samara (twenty-two people) from 2016 to 2018. The author has established that the subcultural subject is processual and dependent on the practices in use; a change in practices leads to a change in the subject. Changes of practices in the graffiti subculture were a result of the virtualisation of culture. The author has identified the changes that have taken place in the subcultural subject under the influence of the transformation of the public sphere (the ‘short time’ of instantaneous fame prevails over the ‘long time’ of the symbolic capital of the nickname, new space-time coordinates within which the entity exists, the ‘digital body’ of the subcultural entity becomes ever more informative rather than that which was created via sketches placed in urban space). Unlike the public sphere, the private sphere under the influence of a subculture ideology remains unchanged.


Author(s):  
Camilo D. Trumper

Chapter two examines how those on the Left and Right alike crafted political narratives on the street that made new sense of these idealized views of the city and of citizenship. In an effort to fashion political opposition to Allende, women organized around the specter of food shortages, scarcity, and price inflation in the December 1, 1971 March of the Empty Pots. Circulating information and organizing meetings in the press, supermarkets, food queues, and hair salons, they politicized traditionally “apolitical” places. In so doing, they created new possibilities for political association and debate. They also made gendered spectacle of “reclaiming the streets” from Allende supporters, banging empty pots and pans to arguing that they were forced out of their domestic worlds by the “dire” lack of subsistence goods and into the contested space of urban politics. Studying this emblematic protest through the intertwined lenses of gender, politics and the public sphere, Chapter 2 reveals how the ephemeral political practice of protest effectively transformed gendered domestic tropes into legitimate political languages and into the bases for new, gendered, and conservative political identities.


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