Bundespressekonferenz

The earliest roots of today's Federal Press Conference are in the press conferences organized by the General Staff of the Imperial Army during the First World War, which held from 1915, the former stock market journalist and Major Georg Schweitzer. He had already been one of the founding members of the Imperial Press Ball. The "teaching of the people" corresponded to the then prevailing patriotic mood.

After the abolition of the monarchy and the founding of the Weimar Republic, the Berlin-based journalists of the leading German daily newspapers took the organization of press conferences into their own hands and invited politicians and government spokespeople as guests, instead of the other way around.

After the Second World War, this Weimar style was reinstated. The first instances were the state press conference in Hanover, founded in 1947 and the Frankfurt press conference at the Economic Council, in 1948. It broke up again with the founding of the Federal Republic at the end of 1949 and is regarded as a direct forerunner of the Bundespressekonferenz in Bonn. Many of their founding members moved from the Frankfurt to Bonn, after the Federal Government and Parliament were formed there in 1949.

On 15 September 1949, the day of the first federal election, a group of newspaper correspondents called on "all accredited parliamentary journalists to establish a federal press conference", via a notice in Bonn's Federal Parliament. Four days later, the inaugural meeting took place, but officially the BPK was only constituted on 11 October 1949 with the election of a managing committee.

The first press conference held by the BPK took place in the plenary hall of the Federal Council on 17 or 18 October 1949, where Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard answered questions from the members. Later, the press conferences usually took place in the hall of the Defense Committee.

Immediately after the founding of the BPK, several members of the executive board were entrusted with one of the most urgent organizational tasks of the postwar period: the procurement of housing for the Bonn journalists. At that time, only 10% of members were entitled to social housing, which was originally intended only for employees of the Bundestag. Therefore, a number of journalists also lived in the Reutersiedlung, the first such an estate in Bonn. After further subsidies (such assistance for surviving family members) were added, the Social Fund of the Federal Press Conference was launched.

After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, there was a change to the statutes in the autumn to exclude all East German correspondents from the BPK. It was the only exclusion against accredited journalists in the more than 40-year history of the Bonn Republic. It lasted for almost 10 years, until 8 February 1971, when the "Exclusion Paragraph" for East German journalists was removed from the statute, and three years later they were allowed admission to the Foreign Press Association.

From October 1967, the federal press conference was located in the so-called "Pressehaus" in the government District in Bonn, which housed its hall, where conferences were held in front of a distinctive wall with rosewood panels.