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Land og Folk

Land og Folk
Land og Folk from April 1945
TypeDaily newspaper
FormatBroadsheet
Founded1919
Political alignmentCommunist
LanguageDanish
Ceased publication28 December 1990
HeadquartersCopenhagen
CountryDenmark
OCLC number70257033

Land og Folk (Danish: [ˈlænˀ ʌ ˈfʌlˀk]; Danish: Land and People) was a communist newspaper published from 1919 to 1990. It became the main organ of the Communist Party of Denmark (DKP) from 1920 and boomed in circulation during World War II, growing from 12,000 copies in 1940 to 120,000 copies in 1945. The paper was printed in Copenhagen, but distributed countrywide. It ran the Land og Folk Festival, which gathered around 100,000 visitors annually.[1]

History and profile

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The newspaper was established as a weekly in 1919 under the name of Arbejdet (Danish: The Labour).[2] In 1920, it became the central organ of the DKP.[3][4] The following year it was renamed as Arbejderbladet (Danish: The Worker's Paper) after the formation of the Communist Federation.[2] The paper was published on a daily basis from 1964.[2]

Its title was Arbejderbladet until June 1941[2] which was changed to Land og Folk on 1 March 1942,[5][6] after a brief existence with the title Politiske Maanedsbreve (Danish: Political Monthly Letters).[2][7] During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, on 22 June 1941, and a few months before Denmark joined a revised anti-comintern pact in November that same year, Danish police arrested and detained hundreds of communists. On 22 August 1941 the paper was banned. However, it was published illegally by the Danish resistance movement until 1945.[5][8]

In 1950, an automatic Mercedes printing machine and in 1969, a printing press were given to Land og Folk by the East German ruling communist party, SED.[9] The paper had some conflicts with the DKP in the mid-1960s.[10] The paper claimed in the early 1950s that the American Federal Bureau of Investigation was like the Gestapo describing the Truman administration as a Fascist government.[11]

In the 1960s the subscribers of Land og Folk included large number of Russians, and the paper was sent to Moscow each day.[9] However, a rift occurred between the paper and the DKP central committee in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.[12]

Frede Jakobsen served as the editor-in-chief of Land og Folk[13] which was based in Copenhagen.[5][14] David Hejgaard was the industrial editor of the paper in the mid-1940s.[15]

Land og Folk ceased publication in 1982.[16] It was later restarted, but permanently folded on 28 December 1990.[17][18]

The photo archive of Land og Folk is kept in Arbejdermuseet in Copenhagen.[19][20]

Circulation

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In the 1920s its circulation ranged between 4,000 and 6,000 copies.[2] During the next decade its circulation was significantly increased and became nearly 12,000 copies in 1940.[2] By the end of the Nazi occupation in 1945 the paper had a daily circulation of 120,000 copies.[6]

The circulation of Land og Folk was 19,181 in 1952.[21] During the last six months of 1957 the paper sold 10,833 copies on weekdays.[22] Land og Folk had a circulation of 7,100 copies in 1975.[3]

References

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  1. ^ Communisme, No 20-21, 1988/1989. p. 192
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Morten Thing (1990). "The Communist Party of Denmark and Comintern 1919-1943" (PDF). Roskilde University Digital Archive. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 July 2014.
  3. ^ a b "Land og Folk". Great Soviet Encyclopedia (3rd ed.). 1979.
  4. ^ Marc E. Vargo (2012). Women of the Resistance: Eight Who Defied the Third Reich. Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland. p. 61. ISBN 978-1-4766-0038-3.
  5. ^ a b c "Land og Folk - Et illegalt blads historie". HSB (in Danish). Retrieved 16 May 2015.
  6. ^ a b David Gilbertson (2014). The Nightmare Dance: Guilt, Shame, Heroism and the Holocaust. Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador. p. 157. ISBN 978-1-78306-609-4.
  7. ^ "The Danish Resistance against the German Occupation of Denmark 1940-45 under World War 2". Danish Culture. May 2014. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
  8. ^ Nathaniel John Hong (1993). The illegal press in German-occupied Denmark, April 1940-August 1943 (PhD thesis). University of Washington. p. 11. ISBN 979-8-208-10240-4. ProQuest 304072608.
  9. ^ a b Morten Thing. "The Communists' Capital". What Next.
  10. ^ Joseph R. Starobin (1965). "Communism in Western Europe". Foreign Affairs. 44 (1): 68. doi:10.2307/20039144. JSTOR 20039144.
  11. ^ Nils Arne Sørensen (2005). "Narrating the Second World War in Denmark since 1945". Contemporary European History. 14 (3): 305. doi:10.1017/S096077730500247X. JSTOR 20081266.
  12. ^ Thomas Wegener Friis; Władysław Bułhak (2023). "Denmark and Solidarność". In Władysław Bułhak; Thomas Wegener Friis (eds.). A Centenary of Polish-Danish Relations. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. p. 172. doi:10.25162/9783515134682. ISBN 978-3-515-13468-2.
  13. ^ "Who we are?". Tvind Alert. Archived from the original on 2 January 2015. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
  14. ^ Neils Thomsen (January 1968). "The Danish political press". Scandinavian Political Studies. 3 (A3): 144–164. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9477.1968.tb00461.x.
  15. ^ Jesper Jørgensen (2023). "Mass Labor Protest and Trade Union Activism in Early Post-War Copenhagen". In Jesper Jørgensen; Flemming Mikkelsen (eds.). Trade Union Activism in the Nordic Countries since 1900. Translated by Stephen R. Parsons. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 171. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-08987-9_8. ISBN 978-3-031-08987-9.
  16. ^ Henrik Søndergaard; Rasmus Helles (2010). "The case of Denmark" (PDF). Media policies and regulatory practices in a selected set of European countries, the EU and the Council of Europe. Athens: The Mediadem Consortium. p. 110. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 January 2015.
  17. ^ Jette Drachmann Søllinge (14 December 2020). "Land og Folk". Den Store Danske Encyklopædi (in Danish).
  18. ^ "Mediestream AvisID oversigt - København" (in Danish). Det KGL Bibliotek. Retrieved 8 July 2023.
  19. ^ "Arbejdermuseet Museum and the Labour Movement Library and Archives". Europeana. 21 December 2012. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
  20. ^ "The Workers' Museum: Home to History". Digital Meets Culture. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
  21. ^ Taru Spiegel. "Danish Newspapers at the Library of Congress". Library of Congress. Retrieved 8 July 2023.
  22. ^ Britt-Mari Persson Blegvad (July 1964). "Newspapers and Rock and Roll Riots in Copenhagen". Acta Sociologica. 7 (3): 151–178. doi:10.1177/000169936400700302. JSTOR 4193580. S2CID 144443862.