The 'experiential community': early German television and media theory

Abstract

This essay investigates texts by media theorists of the 1930s-40s who anticipated and responded to the introduction of regular television broadcasting in Germany in 1935. My analysis focuses primarily on theorists writing from within the Third Reich, such as Kurt Wagenfuhr and Leopold Hainisch, but contrasts their responses to those of more well known early television theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim. My discussion of these early texts on television is framed by references to postwar media theory. By tracing how early theorists defined the medium specificity of television in both its formal-technological properties and spectator effects, I show how the Nazis conceived of the ideological and aesthetic possibilities of the new medium, in contradistinction to both pre- and post-war antifascist television criticism. As I demonstrate, Third Reich media theorists attempted to position television as a literate high art rather than as a mass medium, and proposed that television's essential qualities were its intimacy, realism, and ‘spirituality’, all of which supposedly allowed for a more direct appeal to and ideological interpellation of the spectator than in any other art or media form. Nazi theorists attempted to elaborate the concept of an ‘experiential community’ of television spectators that was closely aligned to an ethnically defined national community, even though they advocated private television viewing over collective reception. Nazi theorists’ definitions of the properties of television often corresponded to those of post-war theory, especially to the warnings of media theorists who were concerned with television's effects in the public sphere.