ABSTRACT
The story of the German press in the seventeenth century is one of success. The oldest remaining weekly newspapers mark the beginning: the Strassburg Relation (documented since 1605) and the Wolfenbüttel Aviso from 1609. Other newspapers appeared just a few years later, for example in Frankfurt am Main (1615), Berlin (1617), and in Hamburg (1618). It has been shown that by the middle of the century, there were at least thirty cities in which German-language newspapers were published. It is also estimated that a total of 200 Germanlanguage newspapers in more than seventy cities were founded in the course of the century. Toward the end of the century, however, almost every larger German city had its own newspaper, many of which already appeared more than once a week. At the same time, the number of readers is estimated to have reached up to 250,000.
