On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany

Abstract

My research on the professional consequences of the post-1989 restructuring of the eastern German media system came to an abrupt halt when I realized that my initial assumption of generalizable East/West differences in professional culture was not being borne out in my interviews and workplace interactions. Of course, there is nothing unusual about a fieldworker's crisis of faith. Ethnography is not a precise business like mathematics, we like to say, and many of us take solace that our paradigms are inevitably always works in progress. But this discovery was particularly troubling to me because East/West difference had always seemed so certain to me as a point of departure for understanding the dynamics of contemporary German society. After retracing the steps of this conviction to see where I had gone astray, I became even more uneasy when I recognized to what degree my expert academic judgment of difference was nestled on a foundation of commonsensical notions about German culture and identity. In Germany, this common wisdom, what I would term intuitive public knowledge, held and still holds that because there are German citizens of eastern and western origin, East/West is a meaningful axis of social classification from which one can infer stable distinctions of culture, behavior, and character, such as East German dim-wittedness versus West German creativity or West German austerity versus East German humanitarianism.' I was