The following article is from our May 2007 issue.

A Press Baron Named Baroni America was once a bastion of German-language journalism. It no longer is but Werner Baroni, one of its dinosaurs, is still around - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

In the last 300 years, 5,000 German-language newspapers and periodicals were published in North America, according to U.S. historian Henry Geitz. One German, Johann Peter Zenger (1697-1746), was instrumental in bringing freedom of the press to this continent. In 1732, Benjamin Franklin printed Philadelphische Zeitung, the first German-language daily in America. In 1900, there were 633 such papers in the U.S. Today six are left, all with tiny circulations. The last in a long line of exceptional German-American press barons was Werner Baroni, former editor and owner of the lively Chicago-based Amerika-Woche. He will turn 80 on June 6 - and also celebrate his 60th anniversary as a journalist. His story is an extraordinary example of German-American contemporary history.

Werner Baroni lives and works by a nameless canal in Marco Island, Florida, hacking relentlessly away with three fingers on his Smith Corona electric typewriter. Sometimes he stares out of the window to ponder manatees lazing in the murky water. It tickles his sense of the absurd that sailors once mistook these ungainly creatures for mermaids because they seemed half human and half fish. "Mermaids are supposed to be beautiful," Baroni says, "These things are not."

Tall and broad-shouldered, Baroni was once a sailor himself, a German naval cadet in World War II. Fortunately for him, Germany surrendered before he came close to being commissioned, which in those days would have meant almost instant death. But as it turned out, the war became his "journalism 101" as it did for many reporters of his generation, most of them now retired.

Not so Baroni. A freelance writer for the German media, he always has a story to tell. Right now his topic is poet Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862), one of whose haunting verses Germans have been singing on the graves of fallen soldiers since the 19th century: "Ich hatt' einen Kameraden" (In battle he was my comrade).

Baroni knows from experience the elegiac feeling this song evokes because he had watched so many comrades die while he was a teenager in uniform. In March 1945, he was one of 192 sailors who, armed with carbines, were sent to liberate Berlin from Soviet tanks - a preposterous assignment. "Only 18 survived," he says.

Wars forge a particular breed of newsmen, quite distinct from today's college-trained prosecutorial types whose penchant for blame games Baroni finds perplexing. Wars had tutored media luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Pulitzer, the most illustrious reporter in U.S. history. Emerging from Civil War battlefields, Pulitzer learned his craft not at a university but on the job, as a court reporter of Westliche Post, one of the two German-language dailies in St. Louis that were among Abraham Lincoln's staunchest supporters.

For what can a communications professor teach an aspiring journalist who has just escaped death a thousand times? That this world is a tough place? War veterans in the media are survivor types, hard to fool and endowed with that unique sense of the absurd that has been Baroni's trademark throughout his career.

Before he wrote his first news item as a copyboy of a postwar paper in Pforzheim, his military service had cured him of all youthful gullibility. He will never forget the first life-changing fib he was told at age 17 when he was drafted into the paramilitary Labor Service and subsequently assigned to the Flensburg-Mürwick German Naval Academy. "What about my 'Abitur'," he asked his recruiters, referring to his high school diploma. "You will earn your degree at the naval school," he was told. It never happened. That's why Baroni, like Pulitzer a century earlier, is technically a high school dropout.

The war also cured him of buying into clichés. "My officers tried to convince me what immaculate people Prussians were," relates Baroni, a southern German, with a chuckle. "Then they billeted me in the most Prussian of all places, the Imperial Palace in Berlin. I emerged riddled with bugs and lice." But the most grotesque falsehood he heard was when he, a sailor, received his orders to stop the advance of Soviet tanks with a short-barreled rifle. "'The Russians are cowards, they will never attack,' my officers insisted, and I just wondered: How come they got that far then - overrunning Berlin?"

The point is, one stops taking oneself too seriously if when early life experiences confirmed the truth of the sardonic German axiom: "Es gibt nichts, was es nicht gibt" (Nothing exists that doesn't exist). What conceit will endure once one has escaped from a freight train crammed full with undernourished prisoners of war, only to discover that one's new home will be the space under an aunt's kitchen table because 93 percent of one's hometown, Pforzheim, had been destroyed in Allied air raids and every square foot of auntie's house was already occupied by survivors?

That Baroni's first civilian job was in the municipal sewage system, and his first civilian suit a cumbersome garment tailored from a blanket he had stolen from a U.S. Army truck, inoculated him well against hubris. The fact that Baroni's first media assignment was to cart newspapers to a kiosk on a bicycle taught him abstinence from any aspiration to stardom. Later in America, though a minor media mogul, Baroni continued to do precisely that - transport stacks of newspapers after performing personally the most pedestrian editorial chores for the benefit of his immigrant readers.

In the mid-1980s, I marveled as Baroni, equipped with notebook and camera, rushed from meeting to meeting of the then 172 German clubs in the greater Chicago area, only 32 of which are still around. Then he raced back to the offices of Amerika-Woche, a well-crafted weekly he and his wife, Edith, had cobbled together in their basement in Skokie, Illinois, from 10 different German-language papers they had purchased in assorted parts of the United States.

At its zenith, Amerika-Woche sold over 30,000 copies, an astronomical figure for an "ethnic" publication. Its newsroom was above the Brauhaus on North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago's German high street. And there, night after night he developed his films and typed his stories, knowing that whatever he might write would offend one or the other of these self-important organizations. Once a somber eight-man delegation of the Rhenish Singing Society knocked at his door demanding to know why he had written a shorter article about their group than he did of the Swabian singers.

Baroni replied with a straight face: "We did this because we knew that you would honor us with your visit." Baroni once pulled his readers' legs by proposing in an editorial the abolition of all but two German clubs in Chicago. The money they waste, he suggested, would be put to better use by establishing a German musical week featuring the Berlin Philharmonic.

The resulting ire was great but short-lived because everybody knew that he would also mobilize the immigrant community's support for sick readers who had never learned English, and raise tens of thousands of dollars to help Pforzheim after it was struck by a devastating tornado. That was the gentle Baroni.

The fiendish journalist, on the other hand, would play an April Fools' prank by informing his subscribers that if any wished to migrate back to their homeland for free they would have to telephone the German consulate-general in Chicago on April 1. "What are you doing to us," sighed the consul general in a call from his home. "You have made these fools block all our lines for an entire day."

To Baroni, these were highlights in his American career, which began in 1957 when he and his young wife, Edith, sailed to New York on the Italian ocean liner MS Italia. Their beginnings in America were inauspicious. At first he could only find employment as an unskilled laborer in a custom jewelry factory, where he met anti-German prejudice on a daily basis.

"Every morning a co-worker asked me, 'How many Americans have you killed in the war,'" Baroni recalls. "Eventually I grabbed him by his shoulders directing his attention to a 130-gallon container of acid. 'I have never killed any American, but I swear you'll be the first one if you ask me this stupid question one more time.' The prospect of being dissolved in 120 gallons of acid produced a sobering effect. After that he left me in peace."

The immigrants' fear of anti-German sentiment was a contributing factor in the gradual disappearance of the once thriving German-language media in the United States. In the 1950s, venerable papers such as the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung in Texas switched to English because their readers, fourth-generation Americans by then, had abandoned their German mother tongue. "During the war, it had become bad etiquette to speak that language in front of men in uniform," says publisher Doug Toney.

As for Baroni, he soon advanced from unskilled laborer to executive editor of the venerable New York Staatszeitung und Herold, then still a daily. It had once been a major publication selling 60,000 copies a day in the late 19th century, 20,000 more than The New York Times. When Baroni ran the Staatszeitung from 1960 to 1963, it still had a circulation of 30,000. But that figure shrank fast, primarily because newcomers from Germany and Austria were in a rush to integrate fully into the American culture.

Whenever a reader canceled his subscription, Baroni called him. And then, he says, something like the following dialogue ensued:

Baroni: "Why don't you want to read the Staatszeitung anymore?"

Reader: "Vee don't shpeak Tcherman no more."

Baroni: "How long have you been in this country?"

Reader: "Zree Jahre already."

A distressing encounter with anti-German feelings marked the lowest point in Baroni's otherwise gratifying American career. In the mid-1960s as editor of the Chicago-based Abendpost, he invited former world heavyweight boxing champion Max Schmeling to participate in the local Steuben Parade. "So great was the public agitation about this alleged 'Nazi's' appearance that Chicago's fire commissioner, fearing a riot, asked Schmeling to stay away from the event," says Baroni. "The two of us watched the parade on television in Schmeling's hotel room."

In fact, Schmeling was never a member of the Nazi party. He had rejected an award from Hitler, retained his Jewish manager, sheltered two Jewish boys, Henry and Werner Lewin, in his Berlin apartment and then smuggled them out of Germany. After the war, he remained a steadfast friend of his impoverished 1938 opponent, Joe Louis, an African-American. Schmeling paid Louis' medical bills and his funeral at which he also served as a pallbearer.

In the end, though, it was not at all prejudice that killed most of the German-American media, but technological progress combined with the inefficiency of the U.S. Postal Service. "Mail delivery became so bad that our circulation went down rapidly because subscribers often received their copies two weeks late," says Baroni, who sold the paper in 1994 before moving to Florida.

On the other hand, Amerika-Woche could not compete with the Internet and German television channels now available in the United States in one essential service - informing immigrants quickly of the Bundesliga (national soccer league) scores.

So here is Baroni, 80 years old, almost back to where he started six decades ago: just a reporter typing away with three fingers, albeit this time at least by the sea and surrounded by Manatees. And he is making plans for the future. Still, he has a problem. He still sends his manuscripts to his clients the old-fashioned (and for them labor-intensive) way - by fax. "I have never mastered computers and the Internet," he says ruefully. "Now I will have to get started. I guess I'll be finished by the time I am 90."