The Press: The Great Dane

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In a three-story building on Copenhagen's Pilestraede repose more than two centuries of history—all trapped the moment it was made. From Paris, there is an eyewitness recording of Marie Antoinette's composure on her way to the guillotine: "She seemed content to walk toward the moment which should deliver her from her innumerable sufferings." George Washington's obituary supplies the clinical details—"died in his 67th year from inflammation of the throat after 23 hours of illness"—together with a curious compliment: "As long as he was President of the United States, he never gave any of his relatives important offices."

The building on the Pilestraede is no museum. It is the headquarters of Berlingske Tidende (Berling's Times), Denmark's largest daily newspaper, and a publication so viable that it is bought by one out of four of all newspaper subscribers in Denmark. The execution of Marie Antoinette, the death of Washington are events frozen on fragile, age-yellowed pages in Tidende's library, where bound copies of the paper date back to 1749. That was the year that Ernst Henrich Berling, a Copenhagen printer, secured a license to send news through the royal mail. The license has long since expired, along with Frederik V, the monarch who granted it. Frederik IX now sits on the throne. Ernst Berling, too, died long ago. But six successive generations of Berlings have preserved Tidende's title as the oldest newspaper in the world.

Original Subscribers. Tidende stands in deeper debt to the Danish national character than to Berling family pride. It has never been a great paper, although consistently a good one. Created by royal dispensation, it remained stubbornly loyal to the throne, even after 1904, when the government began printing a newspaper of its own. But time has long since stranded Tidende's taproot conservatism; successive mass movements to the political left have forced the paper into the role of minority voice. Today a Radical-Liberal coalition is in power, and instead of swearing daily allegiance to the throne, Tidende finds gentle fault, taking circumspect swipes at the high cost of a welfare state, plumping a little more insistently than Parliament for Denmark's entrance into the Common Market.

What has not changed is Tidende's dominance in an overcrowded field. Tiny Denmark, only half the size of Maine and no more populous than North Carolina, fields no less than 80 dailies. But in two centuries, Tidende has become an unbreakable habit. On its circulation lists are descendants of subscribers originally signed up by Ernst Berling. In Copenhagen, a city of 1,250,000, the seven papers that compete with Tidende's three —which include B.T., a tabloid, and the evening Berlingske Aftenavis—together muster a circulation barely matching the Tidende group's 353,000.

Paid Advertisement. Two centuries have also taught Tidende all that it needs to know about the melancholy Dane, the Hamlet who broods between the lines of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. The country's suicide rate is among the highest in Europe, but that is considered a personal business, not for print. In Tidende, as well as other papers, such deaths are discreetly called "sudden."