From Public to Private: Television in the Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract

Public service broadcasting was a given for the Federal Republic of Germany as it emerged in 1949. Broadcasting had been public before the war, in the Weimar Republic, and it was expected to return to those public structures with the formation of the new Federal Republic of Germany. The eagerness of the occupational forces to prevent what had happened to the media in Weimar strengthened this public-democratic tendency. In practical terms, this meant that the occupational forces implemented the public service structures of their own native countries. The indigenous input in rebuilding the channels of communication came primarily from the segment of the German intelligentsia that had opposed fascism and that now sought to connect with prewar left and liberal media theories. Since these theories, from Benjamin and Brecht onward, placed an enormous emphasis on questions of the apparatus, i.e., on the institutional aspects of communication, they helped both directly and in a mediated way to shape the new public service broadcasting stations of the Federal Republic. The need for theories of the media such as these, which investigate the socio-political premises and the structural components of a given system of communication, has become more urgent in the 1980s and 1990s, when commercial television, ushered in by a conjunction of economic, technological, and media-political concerns, threatens to undermine the whole tradition of public service broadcasting. For the viewer, these structural concerns materialize in programming. The links between a certain type of broadcasting institution and a certain type of programming have been the center of much criticism, many heated debates, and an occasional excellent analysis.