Audience Interpretations of (Former) East Germany’s Representation in the German Media

Abstract

Although there has been growing concern among analysts of German politics and society over the last 10 years about the persistence of a ‘cultural’,‘social’ or ‘psychological’ divide between (former) east and west Germany, most current research in this field shies away from a thorough investigation of the complex networks of socio-material, historical and spatial relations that contribute to the construction of social identities. Few studies exist on the impact of media representations and on the differential way in which many of the latter portray east and west Germans, while even less attention has been paid to people’s own interpretations and their capacity to negotiate between media representations and other social experiences in the process of identity formation. In this paper I begin to address these issues by focusing on the interlink ages between (former) east and west German interviewees’ understanding of their ‘place’ in the unified nation and the interpretations they construct of representations in the televised media. My aim is to show both the significant role which images play in the formation of marginalized v. centred social positions and identities, and the way in which viewers’ embodiment in complex networks of social relations helps to reiterate as well as to contradict the meanings that they find constructed in media representations. The point of this paper is not to determine whether binary definitions of east and west German identities are ‘true’ or ‘false’, but how effective they are and on what basis they can be contested.