Censors often interfered with the reporting, especially because the paper's pro-Protestant stance during the Thirty Years' War prompted the Catholic Imperial Court in Vienna to demand that the Elector of Brandenburg take action against it.
In the end King Frederick William I revoked Lorentz's concession and transferred it to Rüdiger, who published the newspaper, now as the Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung, without interruption and without significant changes, so that continuity was maintained for its readers.
Because his father, King Frederick William I, had decreed that no expressions of opinion, and certainly no critical ones, could be printed, the paper contained only trivial news items, mainly about festivities at court, receptions, criminal cases and executions.
But on the second day after his accession to the throne in 1740, Frederick II commissioned his bookseller Ambrosius Haude to publish two new newspapers in Berlin, one in German, the second, which lasted only a year, in French.
Berlin's papers enjoyed greater freedom at that time than newspapers of other German states and were able to spread almost unhindered the ideas of the Enlightenment, to which Frederick II was committed.
Its real title as of 1785 was Königlich Privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen (Royal Privileged Berlin Newspaper of State and Learned Matters), and in 1806 the header note 'Im Verlage Vossischer Erben' (In the Publishing House of Voss's Heirs) was added.
The entire editorial staff attended the funeral of the 'March Fallen', the 183 civilian victims who died in Berlin on 18 March 1848, while fighting at the barricades against the Prussian troops of King Frederick William IV.
When press censorship was abolished the same month, an 'Extra Edition of Joy' was published in Berlin: "Of all the rights the fulfillment of which has become ours and for which we hoped, liberated thought is the noblest, for it is the prerequisite of all that is to come.
"[1] In the course of the conservative counter-revolution, however, after democratic newspapers were banned and printers closed in November 1848, the Vossische Zeitung qualified its progressive stance and had to deal with criticism and ridicule because of it.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the Vossische maintained a solid position in the Berlin newspaper market but fell far short of the circulation of the new mass-circulation papers from the Ullstein, Scherl and Mosse publishing houses.
The paper's ownership structure had become more complicated; the company shares now belonged to various members of the Lessing and Müller families and were later partly taken over by the newspaper entrepreneurs Rudolf Mosse and August Huck.
Through 1910 the paper retained the name Vossische Zeitung; the previous main title (Royal Privileged Berlin Newspaper of State and Learned Matters) remained only as a subhead.
With the collapse of the German Empire on 9 November, 1918, two days before the official end of World War I, the reference to royal privilege in the newspaper's title became irrelevant.
The papers of the Ullstein publishing house spoke out in favor of the republic; in mid-November an editorial in the Vossische Zeitung called for the rapid convening of a representative national assembly.
[6] Not long after Adolf Hitler came to power at the end of January 1933, censorship authorities of the Nazi state began to significantly impede the work of the Vossische Zeitung.
When the National Socialist Schriftleitergesetz (editor law) came into force on 1 January 1934, Nazification of the German press was enforced, and publishers lost their influence on reporting and on the composition of editorial offices.
[7] In the 1920s, Richard Lewinsohn, also a contributor to the weekly Weltbühne under the pseudonym Morus, headed the business editorial department, and Monty (Montague) Jacobs became known as a feature writer and theater critic.