After resigning from Die Welt in 1960 in the face of growing disputes with his publisher regarding the newspaper's political positions, journalist Paul Sethe declared that “Press freedom is the freedom of 200 wealthy people to spread their opinions” (185). Sethe and may other journalists found that the press freedoms enshrined in the West German Basic Law could be strictly limited and influenced by the magnates who owned and controlled the media. Sethe, who had worked as a reporter during the Nazi dictatorship, found himself engaged in a seemingly perennial struggle to express his own opinion as a journalist, despite the fact that West Germany was now a democratic state.

This struggle is the central issue explored in Volker R. Berghahn's rich and detailed study. The author states at the outset that this is “a study of the situation of journalism and its practitioners as they grappled in the twentieth century, and are grappling to this day, with the age-old question of the freedom of expression and, more particularly, their own freedom to report on current events and articulate their views” (1). The author focuses on three broad themes: How did journalists survive and understand the Nazi dictatorship? What ideas did they have regarding how to reconstruct Germany following the end of World War II? What were and are the challenges to journalism and freedom in the age of mass communications and social media?

Berghahn focuses on three individuals in order to examine these ideas: Paul Sethe (1901–1967), Marion Countess Dönhoff (1909–2002), and Hans Zehrer (1899–1966). All three belonged to what Berghahn describes as the “Generation of ’32”: Germans born before World War I who came of age during the Weimar Republic. All three journalists started their careers enjoying the press freedoms enshrined in the Weimar constitution, were forced to confront the aggressive attacks on those freedoms under the Nazi regime beginning in 1933, and then helped lay the foundations for a new democratic order in West Germany after 1945. Berghahn's subjects share other notable biographical traits: all three underwent some form of inner emigration during the Nazi dictatorship, and they spent their postwar careers working as part of the network of newspapers and media organs centered in Hamburg.

Yet Berghahn's three subjects also are different enough for a comparison to produce interesting and thoughtful conclusions. Berghahn devotes a chapter to each journalist, relying on a number of newly available sources—such as Dönhoff's personal papers, Sethe's letters, and Zehrer's diary—which allow him to better examine their private lives. Using both these personal documents and the journalists’ published work, Berghahn offers interesting insights into how these individuals publicly and privately reacted to events such as the Nazi seizure of power, the conservative plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, and the start of the Cold War.

As Berghahn demonstrates, all three individuals embarked on some form of inner emigration during the Nazi era, neither becoming members of the active resistance nor refusing to join the National Socialist Party. Yet they all flirted with both extremes. As the author contends, “Those who saw themselves as inner emigrants operated within a spectrum that extended from grudging cooperation to passive resistance that could become more active as the war unfolded” (11). For example, Sethe and Dönhoff knew people involved with the conservative resistance movement that attempted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. At the same time, Sethe continued to work as a journalist throughout the Nazi period, and his reports often helped lend legitimacy to the regime and its war effort. Zehrer spent a great deal of time during the war years leading a meager existence on the island of Sylt in the North Sea keeping his political opinions a closely guarded secret. Before the Nazis assumed power, however, he had advocated for a right-wing, anti-democratic coalition that would also include the Nazis. In the months following the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, he had also written a number of articles supporting the new regime.

The author provides interesting details about how Sethe, Dönhoff, and Zehrer worked to establish a new, democratic press in West Germany. Their role in this process is further explored in the chapter on the Hamburg press network that emerged during the early years of the Federal Republic. This valuable section of the book recounts how publishers such as Axel Springer, Gerd Bucerius, and Rudolf Augstein laid a critical foundation for the Federal Republic's postwar media landscape. The chapter develops Berghahn's broader themes regarding the various limits on expression that journalists confronted. As he pointedly observes, although West Germany's Basic Law granted reporters the right to freedom of expression, “If their publisher disagreed with their views, they could be asked to toe the newspaper owner's line or leave and join an enterprise that was prepared to publish their views. In other words, the basic right rested constitutionally with the entrepreneur and not with the employee” (106).

Berghahn also recounts the degree to which Konrad Adenauer's government used its power to pressure and manipulate the West German press. These authoritarian tendencies reached an apogee with the Der Spiegel affair in 1962, an important caesura in the history of the press in the Federal Republic, which “undermined the autocratic traditions of the Adenauer government and fostered firm adherence to the principles enshrined in the Basic Law” (215). Underscoring the fraught but symbiotic relationship between publishers and reporters, Berghahn shows that Der Spiegel's owner, Rudolf Augstein, was among those accused of treason and incarcerated by the West German government for leaking information on NATO military exercises.

Berghahn's book represents a thought-provoking assessment of the tense relationship between journalists and those in positions of power throughout the twentieth century. It is also a fascinating and detailed exploration of how intellectuals in general navigate the limits of expression and thought under both dictatorships and democracies. It will be of interest to all scholars working on the history of German journalism, politics, and intellectual life during the twentieth century.