The Fourth Ingredient

In Pfungstadt, a village near Frankfurt, a makeshift press rolled out Germany's first free newspaper since pre-Nazi days.

It was a hurried edition of Stars and Stripes, with a hopeful editorial: "The Germans have what it takes to win back their freedom. Good machinery, good ink, good paper. All they need is the truth." That was three years ago.

Last week, to help them get the ingredient of truth, a topflight German newsman, Erik Reger, was in the U.S. to report on ECA and the U.N. A group of U.S. newspapers and the Columbia network had sponsored Reger's trip, after hearing of the good job he did in covering the last London conference.

Key Man. As editor and publisher of Berlin's Tagesspiegel (Mirror of the Day), biggest paper in the U.S. zone, 54-year-old Reger is a key man in the Allied effort to reestablish a free German press. In the summer of 1945, when "good" Germans were hard to find, American officers summoned him from his village of Mahlow. They knew his record: he was a onetime (1920-27) publicist for the Krupp works at Essen, later an anti-Nazi novelist and broadcaster. During the war he had escaped the Gestapo's notice by dropping his pen name of Reger for his real name, Hermann Dannenberger.

Nevertheless, to make sure he had never been on the Nazi side, he was quizzed for seven days in the Army screening center in Bad Orb. Then the A.M.G. rounded up ten editorial assistants for him, lent them newsprint, and put them to work in the big red brick building that once housed the famed Ullstein publishing house.

Key Paper. The paper began as a thrice-weekly, became a daily in two months. Circulation rose to 450,000 copies a day, then was cut back to 350,000 because of the newsprint shortage. Today, printing six to eight grey, pictureless pages a day, the paper has 40 editorial staffers, 40 linotypes and four presses.

The Tagesspiegel is not Berlin's biggest daily (the Russian-licensed Taegliche Rundschau sells 800,000 copies, the British-licensed Telegraf 600,000), but it is the best-balanced. It is not pre-censored, follows no party line. Thus, it has readers in all zones. Written in prosy, pedantic German, it runs unemotional editorials that occasionally criticize vacillating U.S. policy. Reger's own articles, like himself, are stolid, learned and long-winded. His chief troubles are those of all the German press: newsprint shortage (most of it comes from the Russian zone), and newsmen who are untainted but untrained.

Editor Reger feels fairly hopeful about the future. "In the American zone," said he, "we have a good start. We have made fair use of the freedoms that have been granted. In the press the feeling for democracy is much stronger than it is in the political parties."

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