East German Television Research Articles

Imbibing the Future: Alcohol Moderation and Modernity in 1960s and 1970s East German Broadcast Media

This article explores the representation of alcohol on East German television, radio and film in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyses the state media's attempts to strike a balance between preaching moderation in the name of public health and co-opting the cultural legacy of beer, particularly for working-class men. The attempt to accomplish both goals simultaneously resulted in a seemingly contradictory programme of public messaging that reveals efforts by the socialist leadership to calibrate their vision of a modern socialist future to accommodate the persistent power of a cultural commodity in Germany.

Bad Vibes: Images of Communication, Emotional Balance and Health in East German Television, 1970s-1980s

Analysing health education films from the German Democratic Republic broadcast on TV during the 1970s and 1980s, this paper explores how emotions were framed as health risks and how this framing corresponded with socialist ideas on communication and media theory. I argue that television offered an ideal medium for updating traditions of social hygiene and that it served as a means to the socialist concept of “emotional education”. Television and public health met in highlighting socialist ideas on social interaction: health education aimed at cultivating trust to reduce organic diseases. At the same time, creating trust and intimacy was one of the main promises of the new medium, a function bolstered by its location in the home. To achieve these, they turned to the emotional effects of the spoken word.

Cold War Television Diplomacy: The German Democratic Republic on Finnish television

AbstractThis article opens a new perspective on Finland’s Cold War history by highlighting the role of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) in providing information about the German Democratic Republic as a particular polity, economy, and key player in the European Cold War landscape. The analysis is based on search results from the YLE digital database (Metro) from 1970–1989, and it is supported by documents from the German Broadcasting Archive [Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv] and the YLE company archive. The archive documents and metadata testify about a long-term interest in East Germany in Finnish television, as well as long-term contacts and collaboration between East German and Finnish television companies, in the executive as well as at grass roots levels.

“Because every recipient is also a potential patient” – TV Health Programmes in the FRG and the GDR, from the 1960s to the 1980s

In the television programme of West Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s, health magazines like Gesundheitsmagazin Praxis [Practice Health Magazine] (produced by ZDF)1 or ARD-Ratgeber: Gesundheit [ARD Health Advisor] played an important role in addressing health and disease as topics of public awareness. With their health magazine Visite [Doctor’s rounds], East German television, too relied on continuous coverage and reporting in the field. On the example of above magazines, this paper will examine the history, design and function of health communication in magazine-type formats. Before the background of the changes in media policy experienced over three decades and the different media systems in the then two Germanys, it will discuss the question of whether television was able to move health relevant topics and issues into public consciousness.

Depictions of Social Dissent in East German Television Detective Series, 1970–1989

This article discusses the processing of social dissent and its media relevance in East German society in the 1970s and 1980s. The Gegenwartskriminalfilm (contemporary crime movie) Polizeiruf 110 and the courtroom television show Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort are fruitful film sources for analyzing the specific ways in which social reality and social inequality were constructed and negotiated in the Communist state. Social images as mirror and manifestation of effective public attention to and the perception of social problems shed light on the social symbolic order: They reveal the opposition of “good” and “bad” behavior, with a contrast in their symbolic representations.

Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic by Heather Gumbert (review)

Reviewed by: Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic by Heather Gumbert Stewart Anderson Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic. By Heather Gumbert. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 242. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-0472119196. Anglo-American scholars have rarely troubled to look closely at the history of German television. West German television archives are notoriously difficult to navigate, and historians have long considered the East German system a simple receptacle of the propaganda of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) and hence unworthy of serious attention. As a result, there are few English-language monographs [End Page 699] that spare more than a passing thought for such an important and vibrant topic. With these lacunae in mind, Heather Gumbert’s Envisioning Socialism is a welcome addition. Admirably brief, it employs a tight, flowing narrative to illuminate the contours of East German television during the 1950s and 1960s. Gumbert’s central thesis is that television in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) gradually became an ideal venue for negotiating and mediating the formation of a socialist identity. During the early 1950s, SED authorities fundamentally misunderstood television as a Cold War battleground that could be conquered or occupied. Only after a period of trial and error did station and political authorities come to define and execute a more specifically socialist vision of the GDR. The book is organized in a roughly chronological fashion, with each chapter explaining a new step or landmark on television’s path to “envisioning socialism.” Gumbert begins by looking closely at the way technicians sought to create a viable system of television distribution and operational capacity. From erecting transmitters along the border to working with VHF broadcasting standards—used in Western but not Eastern Europe—the technical “invention” of television in the GDR centered on winning the Cold War through broadcasting volume. Indeed, authorities took many of their decisions with West German viewers in mind. In terms of early programming, Gumbert looks at how overworked producers experimented with genre, lighting, camera angles, “live” broadcasts, and entertainment. She argues that they created a vibrant nightly program in the face of indifference from the SED, which thought of television as a simple vehicle for communist agitation efforts. Two pivotal events forced authorities to rethink television’s mission: the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. East German television barely covered the events in Hungary, whereas the revolt received heavy airtime in the FRG. The failure to cover such a “dramatic and visual” (71) event, Gumbert argues, convinced the SED to place more reliable officials in the station administration and mandate that the medium participate in constructing socialism. The tensions leading up to the Berlin Wall simultaneously deepened the urgency of Cold War, pan-German messages and—particularly after August 1961—marked the beginning of efforts to construct an East German identity, most notably by pointing out the dangers of the West. In the wake of these crises, television became a tool for nation-building and consensus. Sweeping historical epics centered on socialist conversion stories, viewers pushed back against avant-garde programs such as Fetzers Flucht, and censors exercised tighter control over programming decisions. Gumbert thus demonstrates that television “normalized” East Germany (104). It provided entertainment to appease viewers and keep them away from the Western channels, but it also carefully cultivated socialist identities and depicted the GDR as a distinct state in its own right. [End Page 700] Envisioning Socialism relies heavily on political and production documents from the Bundesarchiv in Lichterfelde. In particular, Gumbert makes excellent use of original documents from the collections of the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (SAPMO). She also draws extensively on other types of sources, however, including the private collection of well-known GDR composer Kurt Schwaen and a few carefully chosen viewer letters. The programs themselves are only analyzed as they support or substantiate observations gleaned from written documentation. The book does have its deficiencies. Gumbert’s extensive endnotes, for example, are too heavily laden with important observations that should have been included in the text. For example, note 86...

Envisioning socialism: television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic

Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans' view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilise GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn't compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how by the early 1960s television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.

The Eichmann Trial on East German Television

The trial against Adolf Eichmann was one of the first transnational media events on television. Its world-wide coverage required transnational cooperation. Using East German television reports about the trial this article argues that although the event transcended national borders it maintained at the same time ideological boundaries.

The Eichmann Trial on East German Television

The trial against Adolf Eichmann was one of the first transnational media events on television. Its world-wide coverage required transnational cooperation. Using East German television reports about the trial this article argues that although the event transcended national borders it maintained at the same time ideological boundaries.

Exploring Transnational Media Exchange in the 1960s

This paper uses the history of the East German television service (DFF) to examine the emergence and implications of the international exchange of television content in the 1960s.

Television and protest in East Germany's revolution, 1989–1990: A mixed-methods analysis

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the relationship between television and protest during East Germany's revolution. The content of television newscasts, both West German and East German, is analyzed together with protest event data. There are two key findings. First, West German coverage of protests is associated with an increase in protest in the first phase of the revolution. This finding emerges from time series analysis. Second, West German and East German television coverage were interacting, with the latter reacting to the former. This finding emerges from both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz: Alienation Techniques and the Use of Mediated Material on the Live Stage

Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz Alienation Techniques and the Use of Mediated Material on the Live Stage Steve Earnest Throughout the latter years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, the use of film, video, and mediated settings became an increasingly important aspect of scenography at Germany’s largest state theatres. Key developments in stage technology— such as the use of high-powered projectors, the use of glass slides instead of those made of plastic or acetate, and the increasing use of digital video technologies—permitted greater experimentation with live and mediated action and comprised a permanent part of the German theatre landscape . Given the immense technical capabilities of the German state theatres in addition to their high levels of national funding, multimedia advances have been arguably more profound in Germany than in any place in the world. Perhaps no stage director was more influential in this arena than Frank Castorf, noted Intendant of Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz. From the mid-1980s until the first decade of the twenty-first century Castorf integrated the arts of theatre and cinema in a manner that both heightened the art of stage direction in Germany as well as modified and advanced numerous theatrical concepts, such as the Brechtian concept of verfremdungseffekt, or alienation. Other ideas associated with Brechtian epic theatre, such as montage and the use of music, as well as more radical techniques of deconstruction and postmodern structure as advanced by Heiner Müller, were also employed by Castorf. Unique in his combination of the dual aesthetic of theatre and film, Castorf’s use of cameras on the live stage has challenged theatre aesthetics by contrasting the live stage figure with the full or partial human face in close-up, by utilizing multiple cameras on different 42 S T E v E E A R N E S T areas of the theatrical space and by incorporating the act of filming and camera work into the action of his works. Three of Castorf’s productions , Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Erniedrigte Und Beleidigte (The Insulted and the Injured), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Bertolt Brecht’s Der Jasager/Der Neinsager (He Who Says Yes/He Who Says No),1 serve to illustrate Castorf’s varied directorial approaches and his unique film/theatre aesthetic. Founded in 1914, the Volksbühne has historically been a regular site for live productions that experimented with multimedia and film. The early period of the Volksbühne included multimedia work by Erwin Piscator and the young Brecht; its middle period as a state theatre of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) featured radical experimentation involving Soviet-influenced film and video techniques under the leadership of Benno Besson. Throughout the later years of the GDR and into the post-reunification period, Castorf emerged into the Berlin scene as an enfant terrible, a radical young director who mounted numerous shockingly provocative productions that challenged GDR politics while pushing artistic mores to their breaking point and that subsequently advanced postmodern techniques such as collage structure and deconstruction. An important element of Castorf’s dramaturgy and theatre aesthetic at the Volksbühne was the commingling of live and mediated material as well as the inclusion of rock music (the Rolling Stones and other iconic rock groups have always been prevalent in his work) and numerous references to popular culture. Having served as Intendant since 1992, Castorf steadily developed a reputation as one of the most provocative, innovative , yet notorious directors on the German stage. As a student of Theaterwissenschaft (or Theatre Science) at Humbolt Universität in Berlin in the 1970s, Castorf had studied the theories of Brecht but favored the more radical structure of Müller in practice. Because the strict stance regarding socialist realism had become more relaxed in the GDR in the 1970s, Müller’s synthetic fragments and collage works (such as Hamletmaschine, published in 1971) had become extremely influential among academics. After staging a number of television projects for the East German Television system (DEFA) Castorf began to incorporate ideas of collage structure, including video and other mediated material , into his directorial vision. Alternatively praised...

The Holocaust through the Prism of East German Television: Collective Memory and Audience Perceptions

��� The German Democratic Republic never took the same responsibility for Holocaust memory as the Federal Republic of Germany. East Germans learned relatively little about the Holocaust thorough their popular culture. East Germans were less likely to identify the Holocaust as a critical piece of German history than West Germans, but by examining the muted narrative of the Holocaust that did appear on East German television, this article also shows how East Germans came to have a distinct collective memory of the Holocaust, notwithstanding their viewing of West German television. The following makes use of rarely cited viewer surveys, which offer unique insights into what East Germans thought about the programs they watched. It is a generally accepted fact that East Germans never experienced the same confrontation with the Holocaust that their West German counterparts did prior to the reunification of Germany in 1990, in large part because the official state anti-fascism celebrated almost exclusively the suffering and struggle of the communist resistance fighters. 1 When official state discourse did engage the Holocaust, it was interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of Marxist class analysis, which stated that antisemitism was only a diversionary tactic of the ruling class to distract the workers from the class struggle and revolution. We also know that East Germans regularly participated vicariously in West German political and cultural developments via frequent watching of West German television. Archival documents show that during the early 1970s between 50% and 78% of prime-time viewers directed their attention to the West. 2 The German historian Lutz Niethammer suggested in the 1980s that this dual access to Germany’s difficult past may have led East Germans to a more differentiated view of National Socialism. 3 Yet, unlike the West Germans, the East Germans lacked an open public space within which to discuss their views. Thus, although many East Germans certainly watched the American television series Holocaust when it was broadcast in the West, 4 they were not able to participate in the same wide-ranging public discussions that immediately followed. Nor were they able to participate in the sustained public Holocaust discussions in the West during the 1980s, which took place on television and radio, in the print media, and also in the cinema. 5 One result of this was that East Germans appeared much less likely to

Disappearing reality: the end of East German television

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See Walter J. Schütz, Der (gescheiterte) Regierungsentwurf für ein Rundfunküberleitungsgesetz der DDR, in Arnulf Kutsch et al., (eds), Rundfunk im Wandel. Beiträge zur Medienforschung (Berlin, 1993), pp. 263–304. See Ralf Geserick (ed.), Publizistik und Journalismus in der DDR (München, New York, London and Paris, 1988). See Ernest D. Plock, East German–West German Relations and the Fall of the GDR (Boulder, 1993); John Sandford, The German media, in David Lewis and John R. P. McKenzie (eds), The New Germany (Exeter, 1995), pp. 199–219. K. Peter Etzkorrn and Hans‐Joerg Stiehler, The Valley of the Clueless—results from an historical experiment, Communications, 23 (1998), pp. 271–298. Peter J. Humphreys, Media and Media Policy in Germany: The Press and Broadcasting since 1945 (Rev. ed.; Oxford, 1994). Raymond A. Bauer, The obstinate audience: the influence process from the point of view of social communication, in Wilbur Schramm and David Roberts (eds), The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Rev. ed., Urbana, 1971), pp. 326–346. Regarding John Fiske, Cultural studies and the culture of everyday life, in Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Cultural Studies (New York and London, 1992), pp. 154–165. Peter Hoff, Wettbewerbspartner oder Konkurrent? Zum Verhältnis von Kino, Film und Fernsehen in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Rundfunk und Fernsehen, 33 (1985), pp. 437–455.

‘Memphis Tennessee’ in Borstendorf: boundaries set and transcended in East German television entertainment

‘Memphis Tennessee’ in Borstendorf: boundaries set and transcended in East German television entertainment

A program structure analysis of East German television, 1968–1974

The period between 1968 and 1974 is a special ‘case’ of continuity and transformation for television in the GDR. On the one hand, more than 10 years of programming experience had been accumulated. ...

Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic

In 1961 the East German writer, Hedda Zinner, wrote a stage play, Ravensbriicker Ballade (the 'Ballad of Ravensbrick').' This anti-fascist play was a homage to the approximately 132,000 female prisoners who were interned in this concentration camp and the more than 70 outer camps during the second world war.2 It is based on fact and tells of the rescue of the prisoner, Wera. The remarkable feature of this play is that the situation in Ravensbriick concentration camp is described in a very realistic way. For example, it tells of the tension between the so-called 'criminal' and 'political' prisoners. The play was praised in East Germany not only by the media, but also by the general public. Maybe the painful recognition of many survivors was a reason for this appreciation. In connection with the fortieth anniversary of the capitulation of the Third Reich, a version of Ravensbriicker Ballade was prepared for East German television in 1985. Suddenly, however, orders were issued from political superiors to stop the production. What had happened since its first performance in 1961 to justify the play's suppression? It became evident that Otto Funke, chairman of the East German 'Committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters', had used his influence to stop the TV production. Funke argued that the role of the 'nonpolitical' and 'anti-social' prisoners was over-emphasized. According to Funke, the play also gave too much prominence to the fact that a political prisoner collapsed under pressure from the SS and committed treason, while an 'anti-social' prisoner behaved heroically. Finally, he claimed that the SS was presented in too broad a light. Hedda Zinner argued in vain that she had researched very thoroughly, and that hero-worship was the worst enemy of the heroic. Her protest, however, appeared to be of no use, and the suppression of the play was upheld. This censorship in 1985 of an anti-fascist stage play that had been praised in 1961

Being Jewish in the Other Germany: An Interview with Thomas Eckert

Thomas Eckert, born in 1953 in East Berlin, is a third generation socialistJewishjournalist. His maternal grandfather Hermann Budzislawski (1901-1978) was the founder and, after 1934, Editor-in-Chief of Die neue Weltbiihne, a wellknown left liberal journal in prewar Germany. In exile in the United States during the 1940s, he worked as a ghostwriterfor Dorothy Thompson. After the war he returned to the German Democratic Republic and was appointed Director ofthe Institute ofJournalism at the University ofLeipzig. Budzislawski's daughter, Beate Eckert, worked for many years with the East German television, radio, and news agency. Thomas Eckert, her son, was a journalist in East Berlin. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation injournalism at the Free University in West Berlin. He also writes for Radio Free Berlin.