“Now even Television is Promoting Health?” On the Intertwined History of Television and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention in the German Democratic Republic, 1950s–1970s

Abstract

This paper argues that the historical trajectories of television and cardiovascular disease prevention in the German Democratic Republic are interlocking. These diseases were largely understood as caused by an unhealthy modern lifestyle. Healthcare experts were convinced that health education was an effective strategy to persuade the population to follow a healthy lifestyle. With its rise as a new mass medium, health educators increasingly relied on television as a means to put their message across. Yet the new medium itself was a target of health education measures as excessive TV consumption was considered a potential threat to cardiovascular health. This article deals with the history of health-related problematizations of TV consumption. In the 1950s and early 1960s, during an animated discourse on the strain of a modern lifestyle television was considered a potential source of overstimulation of the nervous system. As this article argues, this interpretation was undermined by a modified concept of TV consumption within the discourse of empirical audience research.