1_Frames Enable Gatekeeping

Frames are principles of sorting. They affirm categories, comprise perspectives, and facilitate convenient modes of printing. [1] Texts require frames and they embed a smorgasbord of content and meaning. Text and frame often conflate. As a unit, tightly bound together, this combination stretches to multiple areas of the 18th and early 19th century press and printing industry. It covers materialities, temporalities, and spatialities as well as modes of representation, of seriality, and of news distribution as well as social interaction. These capacities, sat at the core of this contribution, make frames a highly applicable instrument for all sorts of exchange and trade. This encompasses a literal, material, symbolic, narrative, and economic layer.

Frames enable public and private exchanges. As storage platforms and tools of communication, frames offer ways of making and performing space as well as of marking territory [2] or navigating public discourses. [3] Starting with the presence of frames in media history, literary history, and historical approaches in communication studies, my contribution looks firstly into the commodification of news reports and public announcements in newspapers and journals. Secondly, it tackles business cards. They are objects of social interaction and spatio-temporal media that link the present (of possession) to past events (of collection) and to the datafication of memories (handover at a specific and reminiscent occasion) as well as to the future (potential business, civic, or diplomatic interactions at a specific point in time). Thirdly, I examine menu cards that advertise exquisite dishes and serve as invitations to table fellowships and diplomatic dinners in the highly selective private/public space of German and European aristocratic dynasties. They served as announcement and commemorative media. A varied selection of sources, archival documents and objects help me to elaborate a media history of frames that includes a complementary perspective which extends to: sorting practices, modes of repetition and seriality regarding the recycling of content and knowledge; hierarchies of public relations and relations between governments and publishing houses; and dining as a social, diplomatic, and sensorial space that is bound to tables and regimes of placing dishes in a specific order and temporal sequence. This approach provides an auxiliary access to re-examining published material, for example recipes in cookbooks. [4]

The following will present the argument that frames are much more than semantic containers for narratives and tools for cutting out and resampling news as well as covering up and withholding information from public audiences. Frames are multifarious and relate to different layers of the formatting of publications in 18th and 19th century printing industry, in which, as technological and typographic boundaries, frames were key to the working environments of printers’ shops. Secondly, my examination of frames regards their storing capacities, evoking their potential as spatio-temporalities of memory. The third dimension of my inquiry is that specific material objects, for example cards, in which information is transmitted and visualized within confinements, become tradeable in settings of social communication. Frames border contact zones, in which modes of sorting content meet with people selling news as commodities to consumers, or merchants and diplomats cultivating contacts and social interaction, and in which flows of information and exchanges are hierarchically and asymmetrically distributed between classes of readers. News production and the insertion of public announcements in the late 18th century periodical press are shaped by modes and technologies of framing. [5] In such a constellation, links to temporal, material, and spatial economies unfold and emphasize that mass media during the Sattelzeit period [6] was embedded in an emerging and transregional consumer society.

2_Interlacing Frames and Framing: The Lost Link between Media History and Communication Studies

By and large, media historians share a common ground of omission: they ignore frames and all aspects of framing analysis. [7] And, mirroring this scholarly lacuna, articles and anthologies that feature frame analysis as a tool in communication and media studies have altogether no apposite concept of historical processes and the hierarchies, power relations, and market asymmetries that shaped what we purport to know about the past and its narratives.

For example, certain media historians delve into film and broadcast history, but most tend to research everything that has been written or published. Printing is an industry and a business. It is shaped by technologies and innovations and makes content, mainly literature and news, accessible to multiple audiences and readerships. Early studies on journalism and print media were issued in the 1840s, [8] and as interest in the newspaper business gained ground around 1900, a discipline called Zeitungswissenschaft [newspaper science] established itself. [9] Most of those studies aligned themselves along the broad lines of ominous political master narratives and complied well with traditions that transferred the competencies of the young discipline into postwar communication and newspaper studies. Relation between author, subject, and literary or news content was given primacy, and subsequently any sort of media ecologies or contact zones slid out of the scope.

Since the 1770s, teachers, professors, legal practitioners, writers, publicists as well as political and diplomatic consultants [10] reflected thoroughly on the conditions of (then) modern media and the impact of Zeitungswesen [the press] and öffentliche Meinung [public opinion]. All those accounts pivoted around the practices of making newspapers, of selecting, neglecting, and editing news and were concerned with what the readership would learn and with training it to consume media. Those texts established narrative frames of media criticism and highlighted that moral panic and technological angst had not changed in any significant measure over the last 250 years. Their arguments centered on evaluating what the public wanted, what it should have got, and whether the authorities should intervene or the market forces would sort things out. In the cities in which university teaching staff generated knowledge or a sovereign took up residence, the printing business took off between 1770 and 1850, and local publishing houses launched newspapers and issued content once or twice a week (periodicity) and edited content the subscribers appreciated the most (seriality). In such local environments of media consumption, governmental administrative employees met with traders, merchants, investors, and craftsmen in public, in coffeehouses, reading rooms, at private gatherings, or literary clubs and parlors. Discussing hearsay, and more often than not news did not amount to much more at the time, shaped the boundaries of modern media society in the making. Frames were key to that process and made news accessible and quickly digestible. Frames accelerated the transformation from a premodern to a modern information society. In the following section I intend to clarify the stages of such dislocations and adjustments.

3_Paragraphs, Printers, Periodicals, and Politicians: Frames Sort Content and Contact

To substantiate my overall claim, I start with a typographic example that links a governmental decision-maker, his very well-connected wife, and a newspaper and book publisher. In the extant archival materials of Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822), a Weimar-based entrepreneur in the press and printing industry, I chanced upon a business card. The imprint ‘Monsieur et Madame Edling’ marked the card’s surface. Edling’s name was stamped in heavy paper, along with his designation and occupational title. Between 1815 and 1819 Albert Kajetan Graf von Edling (1772–1841) was Lord Steward and Minister of State and Foreign Affairs of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. Indeed, he ran the government and decided on all political issues, including those that concerned media, press, public communication, and censoring practices. Also worthy of note was his wife’s affiliation. Roxandra Edling (1786–1844) was quite famous within European aristocracy at the time. Her maiden surname was Sturdza and she ranked third in succession to the throne of Russia. She issued the same business card during encounters at banquets, balls, or on the floors of diplomacy. She was known for being well-connected and a hidden player in networks of female dynastic politics in Europe. [11] Bertuch kept the card because it was convenient and provident to value the Edling couple. A merchant in the media and news industry bonded with a retailer of information in the political business.

A business card like hers—plain and simple, austere and cautious—comprises stories. These stories are linked to acquaintances and networks, to close or distant contacts, and relations of power. Such a piece of cardboard is a frame. It is a storage medium that enfolds contexts of dispensing and practices of gate-keeping, and denotes zones of contact.

Premodern flows of information and markets of news and intelligence, as Matthias Pohlig has established, [12] evolved during the 18th century into a setting that projected and delineated the boundaries of the modern information society. One might also add that boxes, storage platforms, and frames played a decisive role within this transformation. Frames condense knowledge and fuel and accelerate the modes of selecting news, editing press reports, and selling newspapers. Frames keep the news cycle afloat and running. Without them, the marketing of information would idle and slack off. Information has been a commodity of military, diplomatic, and domestic political decision-making. Frames transform premodern information assemblage, such as newsletters, schedule of trade fairs, or announcements of temporal pricing regulations, [13] into a setting in which news becomes a commodity. Being tradeable, exchangeable, convertible, and time sensitive were additional qualities of notes and announcements. When information was published as accounts from correspondents abroad, it transgressed space and territory, both in a rather narrow scope and at a greater distance. The paragraph was the frame’s sibling. “Each issue of a newspaper had a set number of pages containing a fixed number of columns. Filling these columns required juggling paragraphs: pieces of text had to be selected, edited, and combined to fit into the available space. […] The paragraph break signaled rupture rather than continuity.” [14]

As news traveled, frames served as containers literally, materially, economically, and symbolically. This entanglement shaped modern media between 1770 and 1850, when premodern formats of information distribution like advice notes [Ger. ‘Avisen’], newsletters, and written papers merged into printed journals and the periodical press. “Framing essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Typically frames diagnose, evaluate, and prescribe,” as Robert Entman explains. [15] He states that frames define problems and “determine what a causal agent is doing with what costs and benefits.” In this regard, frames are tools to diagnose causes, “to identify the forces which are creating the problem and suggest remedies—offer and justify treatments for the problems and predict their likely effect.” [16] Frames shape content. Being time-sensitive and spatially bound, they became a key feature of the news economy, as well as printing and letterpress industry.

Frames set boundaries of contact zones. This is a term that Mary Louise Pratt coined when examining travel literature and the encounters of British male and female writers with the colonial ‘other’ during the 19th century, as well as the images translated and information placed at the disposal of readers and consumers. Selecting facts and sorting fiction shaped the external stability and the interior conditions of a contact zone. [17] Extending this notion, I understand a contact zone as a constellation of power and hierarchy, in which asymmetries in communication collide with business interests of all kinds. The visual and spatial organization of letters and sentences provides premodern social media with gate-keeping capacities, as Pamela Shoemaker outlines when discussing the specific shape and arrangement of gate-keeping. [18] Frames, contact zones, and gate-keeping enclose hierarchies of power, in which processes of sorting, selecting, and censoring are at place. “The gatekeeping process involves every aspect of message selection, handling, and control.” [19] With respect to events, people pass along some details and not others, analysts “provide interpretation and can emphasize some aspects while downplaying others. Communicators pick some elements of a message and reject others.” [20] The elements selected are evaluated according to their importance and, I would add, in relation to their marketability. “A gate is an ‘in’ or ‘out’ decision point, and messages come to the communication organization from a variety of channels,” [21] Shoemaker points out. Such wiring diagram logic has the allure of simplicity, but it may well be that layers of interaction and lanes of communication intersect at numerous occasions and in various capacities. The bigger picture may well consist of different shades of grey. A frame is a lens which enables inspection, revision, and run-through. Referring to Kurt Lewin’s groundbreaking model of social fields that are interrelated by and accessible through gates, [22] Shoemaker explains that “the entrance to the channel and to each section is a ‘gate’,” and movement and mobility of information within those channels is “controlled by one or more ‘gatekeepers’ or by a set of impartial rules.” [23]

A frame regulates access. It keeps gates closed or open. At least in an ideal constellation, it provides space for choices. However, due to asymmetries and hierarchies, such modes of enclosure comprise the capacity to antedate and forestall what is on display and accessible for media consumption, or what is not available, remains absent, and non-present, for whatever reason. In a more literal vein, premodern cities were shaped by walls and gates, gaining domestic stability through the management of access by processes of controlling news, people, time, and space, and by guards’ approval of passage.

4_Frames Commodify Announcements: News Merchants and Journalism (1770–1850)

News is a commodity, a good of trade, which fades and withers over time. [24] The clock is ticking and attentiveness drops. News sells when it is fresh and caught timely. In the 18th and 19th centuries, timelines were much longer, albeit already shortening significantly (as time progressed). The Immerwährender Reichstag [Perpetual Diet of all German territories] held at Regensburg between 1663 and 1806 was a turning point and platform of communication. Information was its currency that played an especially significant role in diplomatic affairs and negotiations. Susanne Friedrich claims that around 1700 print media and exchange of arcane and public information formed markets. At such diplomatic conferences, permanence and interaction produced a broad setting of rules in which communication and secretiveness played a crucial part. Different values have been ascribed to content, news, and intelligence. In such an ambit of power and collaboration, the evaluation of news became a tool and its modes of selling, trading, and dissemination channels through which bias and spin reached a broader readership to generate support or opposition. Striving for a multiparty consensus in terms of information management and public announcements, early press releases were taken into the papers without any additional loop of editing practices. Newspapers aligned reports and messages in sections, endorsed by notifications of places and dates. In such blocks of information, multiple topics and issues were mixed without any kind of structuring. Therefore, the readership was expected to rearrange the news content provided and to construe the information material randomly thrown together. [25] Even if newspaper production and the editing of news was supervised by literary professionals, they relegated themselves solely to the act of selecting and did not comment or elaborate on content. The structure and quality of news as well as a paper’s ideological positioning in transregional informational markets depended on the spatial range of its network of contributors and on the quality of the information gathered. [26] Bias set frames and provided news with direction. Information was sorted, columns and rows filled accordingly. Frames organized content, gave news form and guise when printed on paper. With regard to printing technology and literary diction, frames largely facilitated the practices of information management. They were integrated into relations of resonance, as Hartmut Rosa has outlined, [27] which mark the boundaries of past practices of framing in the emerging industry of printing books and selling journals between 1770 and 1850. Publishers hired writers to collate information and news. Both were new social figures shaping middle class media and information society, and mirrored their needs for news cycles and consumption. Frames were convenient for condensing reports. August von Schlözer’s journal Stats-Anzeigen (Göttingen, 1782–1793) and Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s weekly newspapers Weimarer Wöchentlicher Anzeiger, (1771–1817), later Weimarische Zeitung oder Oppositionsblatt, 1817–1820) are two examples that substantiate the argument that frames were and are practices of sorting content in and for contact zones.

August von Schlözer, fully endorsed by Georg III. Wilhelm Friedrich of Hannover, then King of Great Britain, and employed as a professor of history at Göttingen University from the early 1770s, started multiple printing endeavors. Energetically supported by his wife, Caroline Friederike (born Roederer) (1753–1808), and daughter Dorothea (1770–1825), Von Schlözer compiled news, reused information, and created content fitting for the expectations of subscribers and consumers in the evolving market for periodical journals and newspapers, which were being constantly issued and distributed. [28] He was one of the first to generate a second income out of his publishing projects, like Briefwechsel meist historischen und politischen Inhalts from 1776, whose title changed to Stats-Anzeigen in 1782. [29] The enterprising academic was keen to copiously comment that news provision in other papers was ineffective and insufficient. Frames kept news simple and appellative. In such a technical, creative, and neatly artistic compression of sheet to sheet, space for expressing opinion was highly restricted. He did allegedly refrain from inserting announcements about who was marrying whom at what court, who visited which region, and which actress was staging which play at one of the numerous theatres, or which composer or musician invited the public to a concert. Everything was printed in short and narrowly spaced paragraphs that were separated by frames. Such news listed vanities and inanities, and enlightened as well as entertained the readership. It trained consumers to consider trifle and trivia as valuable and relevant content. [30] Most of the time, Von Schlözer assumed, correspondents referred to irrelevant people that they met randomly in coffee houses. They commonly made up reports by listening to coffee house chatter and gossip. For this reason, he claims, readers ought to have been wary of all periodical publications—except his own—because they were mere collections of rumors that were disseminated via the passage of stagecoaches through towns and villages. Nobody supplied truth and accuracy. [31] Even the publisher and editor regularly took advantage of similar practices, according to an anonymous claim in a polemic account: “Von Schlözer has his correspondents. His correspondents are creating news for him. He merely collects reports and prints them in successive issues. This is how Stats-Anzeigen are produced, so free, so true, depending on the contributors’ capacities to narrate the truth.” [32] Those who read his journals on a regular basis and who study the news with attention and diligence were quite used to sensing inaccuracies and recurrencies. As the anonymous critic pointed out, the latter journal creator showed some talent for inserting news that was written and compiled in the same style. All correspondents reported their accounts in a similar manner to that of Von Schlözer when writing a comment or an article. This led the anonymous critic to the conclusion that The professor of history and part-time editor and journalist reused information and rewrote all reports by himself. The pamphlet stated that the making of news, opinions, and narratives was bound to frames and practices of framing, and obviously to paragraphs as a technology of reading and of diction. [33] Von Schlözer composed information and he, along with his employees, his wife, and his daughter, revealed an outstanding talent for compilating and restructuring written accounts that had been sent to the editorial office. Adding some imagination to accounts spiced day-to-day routine in the late 18th century news trade and journalism. Contrasting journalism, being the alchemy of hearsay and a deviant craft, making prints und publishing manuscripts was an art with letters, which was put into frames.

Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822) and his son Carl (1777–1815) managed a publishing house in Weimar, capital of the Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach dynasty, in which Ludwig Wieland, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Gottfried Herder, as well as many more famous publicists, kept permanent residency. Their printing facility and book distribution workshop was named Landes-Industrie-Comptoir. Bertuch employed many writers who were already well-known names in the literary market around 1800 and thereafter. [34] Mostly on short-term contracts, those craftsmen of public resonance engaged in generating significant outreach as well as local, transregional, or national public awareness. In October 1817, three centuries of Protestant Reformation were publicly celebrated in the streets of Eisenach and along the trails to Wartburg. A play in the local theatre triggered distrust and diplomatic enmeshment. The editors had to accede to rewriting the article and to make a counterstatement in one of the following issues of Weimarer Zeitung/Oppositionsblatt. Minister of State, Albert Kajetan Graf von Edling (1772–1841), reached out directly to Friedrich Justin Bertuch and explained that the censorship expert appointed by the Protestant church and his Ministry suggested to postpone the play until the festivities of commemorating Martin Luther had ended. Furthermore, Edling claimed that Catholics might feel offended by such an orchestration of a national and Protestant hero. It was in this context that he handed over his business card referred to in the Introduction, following which the artistic director of the Eisenach theatre acted acquiesced and cancelled the production. Moreover, the manager promised not to stage anything that would displease even the smallest part of the audience, any interested party or any foreign diplomat respectively. This public statement was made, as Edling assured, fully unsolicited by the administrative and governmental hierarchies and even independent of the general allegations made by the State Minister’s office.

The minister requested Bertuch to enable the theater’s management to place a statement in the Weimarer Zeitung/Oppositionsblatt to avow their good intentions to the readership and the broader public. [35] At the time, briefing and negotiating press affairs directly with a publisher was far from being labeled a censuring practice. Responsiveness was part of doing politics and of navigating his printing business and media outlets through storms of diplomatic outrage. Stephan von Zichy (1780–1853), who was representing the Habsburg monarchy at the Hohenzollern court in Berlin, was visiting Weimar for a couple of weeks. During this stay, he felt obliged to defend Catholic causes and his king’s reputation, and filed an official complaint with the Weimar Ministry of State and Foreign Affairs. In consequence, the Weimarer Zeitung/Oppositionsblatt was closed for some weeks, including over Christmas and New Year’s. The editorial board resumed work in January 1818 but acknowledged publicly that no writer or journalist could rely on governmental help, as long as they outrageously attempted to defame the federal institutions of another state, country, or dynasty; villainize a nation and its people; and ignite commotion and rebellion. [36] Technologically and typographically, declarations functioned as frames within a newspaper. The government’s intention was to discipline the newspapers, journalists, and editors but did not intend to close the enterprise as it was generating an astonishingly high amount of tax income. The editors took the chance to clarify their position and explained that they were obliged to insert this communiqué, signed by the Minister of State, on the first page of the Weimar Zeitung/Oppositionsblatt issue of January 2, 1818. Thus, they placed their own narrative in front of the readerships’ eyes and minds:

We would have liked to open the new issue of our journal with a different article. In the meantime, since we had to include it once, we would at least like to attach to it the wish for the following year that its origin and content, both here and in the rest of Germany, should be and remain unique. For several considerations, however, we believe that we must supplement the above announcement in a few points and impartially communicate a complete narrative of the whole case to our readers, who may still be assessing incomplete data.

Wir haetten gewuenscht, den neuen Jahrgang unseres Blattes mit einem anderen Artikel zu eroeffnen. Inzwischen, da wir ihn einmal aufnehmen mußten, so wollen wir wenigstens den Wunsch zu neuen Jahre daran knuepfen, daß Veranlassung und Inhalt desselben, sowohl hier als im uebrigen Deutschland, durchaus einzig seyn und bleiben moege. Aus mehreren Ruecksichten aber glauben wir, die vorstehende Bekanntmachung in einigen Puncten ergaenzen und unseren vielleicht noch unvollstaendigen Daten urtheilenden Lesern eine vollstaendige Erzaehlung des ganzen Falles unbefangen mittheilen zu muessen. [37]

By means of those lines, an entanglement of disciplining and censoring was laid bare, while Bertuch as well as his new editor and son-in-law, Ludwig Friedrich von Froriep (1779–1847), cultivated the seeds of publicity and middle-class self-empowerment. They cultivated political, social, and economic capital on notions of opposition, even while they interacted rather frequently with those decision-makers who repeatedly cast aside the intellectual, semantic, verbal, and letter-printed foundations of the federal state and dynasty, disseminated and mediatized by publishers who were obedient to the intentions shared in a contact zone in which state politics intersected with practices of communication and publishing. Frames are literally containers of information. Furthermore, they are applied as typographical tools and as storage platforms to serialize and commodify news. Still, if all other major publishing houses were widely complying with news or paragraph-related suggestions issued from governmental functionaries in asymmetrical relations of power, Bertuch and his peers, were at the very least able to accrue wealth in the news and printing market that vitally consolidated between 1800 and 1830. In this case, however, Bertuch and the writer-journalists he employed had to apologize submissively and to commit themselves to standards of reporting and selection of news and promise to improve their journalistic work. [38] At the same time, however, the media manager and news merchant insisted on rights that existed and had already been granted. He claimed that procedures and responsibilities were interlinked, and he, as a publisher, was in possession of civil rights that were, regarding his enterprise as a property, fully granted and enforceable. Bertuch navigated his way around influence, tried to wriggle out of it and signal his willingness to cooperate and adjust. However, this also opened room for maneuver. No one was impartial in this matter. Criticism spiced up this conflict and loaded it with additional meanings and after-effects. It came to refer to narratives and representations and revolve around who was put to justice before a (pan-)German public or before a Weimar board of censorship and its non-transparent ways of producing verdicts. The contact zone of Weimar around 1800 was an entangled universe of media and political communication. It was a space of vanity and resentfulness, and a constant challenge to information retailers to govern a media outlet through cliffs and shallows.

5_Collecting Business Cards: Wrapping Temporal and Spatial Social Interaction

In the transition to the 19th century, the printing business was taped with its artisanal, mercantile, and commercial interests. It was closely aligned to governmental communication policies. Clinging to commodities, contents, and consumption, interlacement was a key feature in those ecologies of contact and it reached its first prime in that period. Printing news on thin paper as well as condensing types and characters on thick cardboard were two modes of storing information and keeping content agile and reproducible in series.

Business cards, such as the one featured above, as well as menu cards were in wide circulation in this printing climate. Both cast information on a storage device and in a visual frame. Narrowly printed letters mark the spatial contingency of the business cards that governed the work of a printer’s workshop. The name was placed prominently in the center of the cardboard. As a material object and paper storage device, within the framed aesthetics, a card narrates entangled and interlaced stories. [39] Retailers, salespersons, and tradesmen and -women within the territories of politics and diplomacy relied on business cards. With these tools in hand, merchants generated, nurtured, and maintained connections. It is important to acknowledge at this stage, that the shape and artwork, font, header, and graphical design were complementary to the form of the object, kept together by a frame. The business cards of Mr. and Ms. Edling were self-effacing and stylish at first sight. On closer inspection, these items expressed severity, importance, and recognition. The following examples of business cards underline that they incorporate social interactions and media technologies, and that they can be descrambled in terms of frames, contact zones, and gate-keeping functions.

Franz Joseph Albert (1726–1789) was a wine merchant whose premises were situated at Kaufingerstrasse 23, at the corner of Liebfrauenstrasse. Located in the vicinity of Marienplatz, in the center of Munich, this was a vivid public space in the residential capital of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Albert owned the Schwarzer Adler, a former roadhouse that had been refurbished as a restaurant and that served as a well-established hotel. It was located “nebst dem schönnen Thurn in Munchen”, [41] which indicated the tower of the Church of Our Lady [Frauenkirche], thus using a landmark building as a point of reference for to tourists, visitors, and potential customers. Albert, who was considerably cosmopolitan, cultivated acquaintances with numerous artists, business travelers, and envoys. He had the above description translated into French and Italian, used a different typeface in each case, and placed the letters in a richly decorated frame, the design of which was reminiscent of a contemporary doorplate. In the 18th century, numerous guests came to Munich to visit the royal seat and stayed there for days or weeks for various reasons. They were looking for guesthouse beds and entertainment. The Schwarzer Adler hotel had a total of thirty-eight guest rooms as well as a spacious dance hall. [42] The wine merchant, performing as a hospitality and gastronomical entrepreneur, commissioned the printing of multilingual business cards, because he recognized the value of supplementary sales opportunities beyond the city limits. These letters stamped on cardboard or heavy paper, which mentioned a brand name, an activity, a service, and a location, opened contact opportunities. They could be inserted into pockets, collected, and remembered. Those who had received such a data carrier, and occasionally held it between their fingers, did certainly recall specific constellations of meeting, speaking, negotiating, and celebrating with the person whose name the card held. The material and imprint enabled memories and made the Schwarzer Adler a familiar place when accommodation in Munich was sought again or recommended to kin and acquaintances.

Carl Godeffroy (1787–1848) was born into an affluent family of Hanseatic traders. A report in a contemporary fashion magazine pointed out that “as the Godeffroy family is one of the first and richest, you will find everything that Hamburg has to offer that is beautiful and elegant in these assemblies, especially the most beautiful ladies. I name no one so as not to offend anyone.” [43] Elegance ruled. Styles were international. At private conventions the participants showcased all kinds of foreign patterns of knitting and fancy accessories—a very ostentatious hanseatic gallery of fashion. Godeffroy owned the most beautiful house at Jungfernstieg, opposite the City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce. In the interior “there are four large, splendidly and tastefully furnished rooms in the same, together with an extremely large hall, in which meals are served at tables for eight, twelve, twenty and more guests.” [44] In addition to those events of social and political networking, the family had strong links to Scottish and English manufacturers of goods and self-made investors. This was the main reason due to which young Carl studied law, economy, and history at the University of Edinburgh. Upon his return to Hamburg, he found his hometown occupied by French troops and military administration. The trade restrictions implemented by Napoleon I between 1806 and 1813, during the blockade of the Continental System, heavily affected the economic relations of Hamburg as a Hanseatic city and port with the wider world. In this period, Carl started his career in municipal politics and learned how to do governance. ‘Mr. Charles Godeffroy. Auditeur du Conseil d’Etat’ was his title during his tenure in the magistrate’s administration under the French military occupation of Hamburg from 1811 to 1814. Godeffroy commissioned a well-known and convenient printing workshop to produce business cards with this title as the header. The printer managed a publishing house and issued the periodical Staats- und Gelehrten Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyischen Correspondenten twice a week. [45] These cards, as material frames cut out of paper, gave Godeffroy opportunities to make himself identifiable and remembered and to account for his position, growing influence, and emerging relevance in governmental affairs. The Edinburgh-educated lawyer branded himself as a future diplomat and political entrepreneur. Performing audits for a city government provided valuable insights into the expenses for hosting the occupier’s armed forces in times of war; spending money well; or allegedly wasting taxpayers’ contributions. To Godeffroy, the ending of the imposed regime on Hamburg was a personal relief and a political and economic release. Being a political and mental caesura, when French troops were leaving the Hanseatic city in 1814, it seemed appropriate to commemorate this event. Therefore, it was worth to label a file of his private repository with this inscription. This random notification within the stock inventory enfolds another story. The ambitious municipal administrative and offspring of a Hanseatic upper-class family made the effort to visit the notorious local printer of his confidence, with whom he and his family had long done business. He asked the shopkeeper and craftsmen to hand over the printing plate, because there was no further need for cards with a title written in the French language. Like a business card, the plate was a frame and the material object which enabled reproduction und reuse of printed items. In the registry of his private archive, this title marked a fresh outset for his career in commerce and politics. [46]

Originating from a very influential merchant family, Carl flourished as a proficient diplomat. Godeffroy’s political career took off and he was assigned to representing the interests of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck in the court of Alexander I, the Russian tsar and emperor, in St. Petersburg. He was then appointed to the royal courts of Saxony and Prussia in Dresden and Berlin for a substantial length of time. During these residencies abroad, he continued collecting cards from other persons he encountered. [47] Collecting business cards meant saving contacts, passing them on, and making them permanent. When he visited London, Rome, Naples, and Florence in 1830 and 1831, he asked for business cards and expanded his collection. [48] Including their names and titles as well as the dates and occasions in a large-scale historical network analysis would generate illuminating results. In addition, Godeffroy also kept a compilation of invitations he received during his residency in Moscow and St. Petersburg, [49] and at the time of the coronation of Nicolas I. This event was excessively celebrated in 1825 and 1826 at dinner parties or masked balls. In addition, his young wife Marianne (1803–1871), who was born into an equally affluent family of retailers with the name Jenisch, also kept a plate in her archive. [50] It was apparently common in well-off Hanseatic families that the daughters and wives commissioned business cards of their own and passed them as gifts or giveaways. All these objects were transferred into Godeffroy’s private residue within the family’s archive at the Hamburg Federal Archive. It appears that the value of these crafted items as historical sources has been neglected in the meanwhile. Nobody ever since has actually considered business cards as objects in which stories of contact and interaction are interlaced. They may certainly help future research endeavors to understand the politics of diplomacy from a different angle, considering the moving of layers of media technologies and representation to the center of economies of social bonding and ecologies of attentiveness. Business cards render temporal and spatial interaction possible and are objects of remembrance and collection.

6_Menu Cards: Gustatory Content and Advertising Alimentary Pleasures

Business and menu cards display a similar capacity. As a medium, they convey the listing of courses and wines and advertise events at which the preparation of food is the main content. They help people to sort information and to register what has been served at a table, on a plate, at what occasion it has been temporally and spatially shared with whom, and with which people of prominence. Such cards advertise courtly and bourgeois alimentary pleasures. In my current research project, I deal with multiple registers of gastronomical and gustatory knowledge, and therefore, I regularly dive deep into pools of archival stocks. When browsing through papers that relate courtly administrations to kitchen management, I frequently stumble upon extensive collections of menu cards. Printed on heavy cardboard, like business cards, but bounteously ornamented, these small formats of information frame multiple eating cultures. Parades of dishes follow one another, or are combined and strung together. Menu cards store informational content that is related to culinary taste and occasions of social communication. They enclose characters and denomination in a frame (materially), condense content (spatio-temporally) in a place and over time, and serve as texts that advertise meals and gala dinners (literally) in narratives of diplomatic gourmandise.

The Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, Carl Alexander (1818–1901), and his wife, the Dutch princess Sophie of Orange-Nassau (1824–1897), traveled to the Palace of Versailles in January 1871. They were invited to the proclamation of the German Emperor Wilhelm I and given the honor of sitting at an enormous dining table, celebrating the victory over France and the foundation of a new empire later that day, January 18, 1871. Overhanging the congregation was the creed of the House of Hohenzollern: “Gott mit uns [God with us].” [51] The mission statement was placed at the top to assign that Prussia will prospectively rule Imperial Germany. The menu card lists the following order and schedule of dishes:

Windsor Suppe (Windsor soup)

Seezungen à la Normande (soles prepared in Normandy style)

Kalbscarré mit Tartare (loin of veal with tartare sauce)

Chaud froid von Gänseleber (goose liver in gelatin)

Fasanenbraten Salat, Compôte (roasted pheasant, salad, and compote)

Stangenspargel (asparagus)

Charlottes von Erdbeeren (strawberry charlotte)

Butter und Käse (butter and cheese)

Dessert und Früchte (dessert and fruits)

The menu card is a textual frame that denotes order, flow, and succession of pieces of gustatory art. Guests at the table would typically be used to such arts and gastronomical pleasures. They would expect exquisiteness and craftsmanship in the field of culinary exploration, merging French flavors with German taste. The Prussian dynasty invited its guests. At the banquet table, all the other sovereigns of German territories (except Habsburg-Austria-Hungary) became bystanders and observers of what was prepared and served. A decade later and on another occasion, the reigning Weimar couple visited Potsdam and dined at Neues Palais in June 1882. At this venue, Prince Wilhelm (1859–1941) and his wife Auguste Viktoria von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (1858–1921) celebrated the christening of their heir Friedrich Wilhelm Victor August Ernst. The ceremonial department of the Lord Steward’s administration had invited all major ruling European dynasties and those principals in the federal German Reich who subordinated themselves to Prussian imperial rule to the celebration. [52] Unlike at the Imperial coronation dinner in 1871, French was the language of gastronomical taste and culinary diplomacy.

Potages imperial (Emperor’s potage)

Crème anglo-belge, (English-Belgian cream)

Gélée d’orange glacée (Jelly of frozen oranges)

Glaces gaufrettes (Iced waffle)

Saumon du Rhin garni, (Salmon from the Rhine with Livorno sauce)

sauce livournaise

It was by and large a crossover of regional cuisines. Printed on wavy parchment, evoking both practices of heralding news and rulers and tributaries, the printed menu card served as an announcement and commemorative medium. The Neues Palais castle, the place of the baptism, was also printed on the card. It was a central feature of the card’s design, a picture with a frame, within a frame in which a text signified European aristocratic commonality, handed at a feast table. An eagle, the heraldic animal of the Prussian monarchy, symbolized territory and ownership. The majestic bird also marked spaces of gastronomical communication and diplomacy. Menu cards gave dishes fringe and binding. In such a frame—being visual, aesthetic, and textual—information about dishes, places, and spaces of meeting as well as gustatory pleasures became storable, ready for collecting and passing on in boxes registered in the depths of archives.

7_Frame Follows Function: Interlacement in the Printing Industry (1770–1850)

Frames have multiple functions, in which various layers mediate and intersect. They brand contact zones that emerge between people, social communication, information exchange, and cultures of memory and media of memorization. In a literal sense of the term, frames are connected to typographic, visual, aesthetic, technological, material, and economic boundaries. In addition to these practices of framing (frames as tools), providing news with bias and direction is a means to streamline narratives (semantics) or, in relation to menu cards, present content that has heralding potentialities (semiotics). This is then bound to visual aesthetics or to narratives or even to occasions and memories of gustatory experiences (sensorial).

News reports unfold its information value when aligned with and placed in a frame. This is then tied to a plot, to a story told in a report, to accounts of events and to summaries of conferences, or to the general editorial concept of a journal or a newspaper. In newspapers, starting in the 18th century, frames have separated paragraphs from reports as well as announcements and communiqués from insertions of advertisements. Aesthetic edging, lines and borders, and types and fonts, marked messages as news. Regarding the media and information industry of the Enlightenment era, the article strove to accentuate the understanding that publicists took on multiple roles to serve the economies of attention as well as to cultivate consumer preferences and to nurture public appeals and desires for information. Publishers were politically well connected in residencies, at courts, or to the Ministers of State and Foreign Affairs. Censorship and instances of press control came in handy under such safeguarding. But with protection came liability and commitment, and they navigated through the shallow waters of media politics, restrictive press policies, and the freedom to commodify information derived from news, economic data, and diplomatic circulars. Frames kept information fresh and ready for sale.

Cards, as I have outlined broadly, also unfold histories and tell stories in various colors. They are aligned to material frames as well as to literal or ornamental ones, which consist of characters, emblems, or signs. This applies to those card formats that issue and announce invitations or visits. Postcards, business, and menu cards are sent, handed over, or taken away. These print media for passing on can be collected, sorted, and stored in private archives. Cards are means of commemoration and serve as frames to envelop past and present usage as well as future application. As a media device and as a tool of storing memory, these items refer to experiences. On the rear page of a menu card, guests occasionally noted with a sharp pencil who they were sitting with at a table on a particular occasion, who took which seat adjacent to another invitee, and enjoyed the individual courses of a meal (in the same room and at the same time). Frame follows function. It comprises contact and context. Against such a historical backdrop, ecologies of media gain ground. This provides an inspiring approach to understanding practices of framing in relation to keeping information digestible and tradeable.

_How to Cite 

Heiner Stahl. “Interlaced Frames: Seriality, Information, and Contact Zones in Late 18th and Early 19th Century Press and Printing Industry.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 18 (2025). <https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2025.1481>.