Zeitungsbriefe und Briefzeitungen oder Die Anfänge der Zeitung

In the last quarter of the 19th century, academics in very different fields of study began to take a keen interest in newspapers. Richard Grasshoff was the first to enter this unchartered territory with his historic dissertation on Philip Melanchton’s early handwritten newspapers, which contained summaries of letters. It was then followed by studies by the national economist Karl Bücher and the cultural historian Georg Steinhausen.
This book presents these three studies in their entirety and supplements them with a biography of Adolf Koch, which had been forgotten for over one hundred years. Consequently, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge and discussion about the origins of newspapers at the start of the 20th century.