Introduction: After the Bardic Era: German Television since 1984

Abstract

Only 18 years ago, in 1981, British media critics Richard Collins and Vincent Porter wrote in their monograph on the WDR Arbeiterfilm: West German broadcasting has a plausible claim to being the most successful instance of public service broadcasting in the world.' Even then, this statement would probably have raised a few eyebrows not only among American television executives, but among American media critics as well. Yet, at the time, it was defensible as a critical position. Politically, socially, and aesthetically, German television, in what, to historicize a famous term coined by John Fiske and John Hartley, could be called its Bardic Era2 was without a doubt among the most lively and innovative broadcasting structures in the world.3 If the