ABSTRACT
Fontane's “eyewitness” account of the London fire belongs to a news genre that had its own name in the media scene of the nineteenth century: it was eine unechte Korrespondenz, “false” (or “unreal”) correspondence. False correspondence was by no means a phenomenon peculiar to the Kreuzzeitung. Several scholarly accounts agree that it was a common production strategy that was probably as old as foreign news reporting itself. This chapter accounts for the rise of this genre and the media-historical conditions that made the production of false correspondence a common practice, a means of doing newswork on an everyday basis, in the final two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and analyzes the unique kind of journalistic knowledge that this genre produced. It shows that false correspondence became increasingly common at the historical moment when the emerging journalistic profession began to place greater value on firsthand knowledge and when eyewitness accounts became a distinguishing feature of good, authoritative reporting.
