Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany)
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0472119192
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 stabilize 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.
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26.1.53,” 26 January 1953. 15. Film could be shown on television through the use of the “telecine,” which shone light through the film, turning the light into the electrical charges that could be read by the television transmitter. 16. Müncheberg, Experiment, 16. 17. Contemporary cameraman Herbert Kutschbach, noted that “one wanted to make the viewer of the television image believe he saw the picture from the point of view of a theater spectator sitting in the parquet.” Kutschbach, cited.
Continues on, comes upon a fishing boat, asks for shelter. His fear of the police gets the better of him, and he tells his story to the fishermen. At this point, the program tells Fetzer’s story in a series of flashbacks. Hanging out by the train tracks, Fetzer hopped a train going West on a whim. He faced his first moment of decision when confronted by the train driver: he would not “let (Fetzer) slip through” (the border) and, after a short struggle, the driver fell to his death on the tracks.
State of television reached a high point in December 1962, when a showpiece program set off a firestorm of criticism that reverberated through the television service, SED meetings, and the press for months afterward. At the center of this maelstrom was a controversial television opera. Fetzer’s Flight was “experimental” (and modernist) in nature, but the crux of the debate really had to do with the emerging notion of the “right” of the viewer to be entertained. The Fetzer aesthetic was confusing.
June Uprising of 1953, the SED took steps to ensure the political reliability of the service, installing “cadres” specialist Heinz Adameck as director of the DFF. Adameck professionalized the service, making sure that it could fulfill the instrumental task set out for it. But exploiting the “live”—the most anticipated novelty of television—remained difficult, and (non-)coverage of the Hungarian uprising drew the SED’s attention and ire. The government thereafter redoubled its efforts to.
The same: both encouraged audiences to understand themselves as part of a larger socialist collective, and each contributed toward shaping the ways of thinking and behavior of viewers in the GDR. The DFF introduced the “investigative” magazine show Prisma in March 1963. One of the most popular and long-running shows on East German television, Prisma ended only after the DFF was dismantled in 1991.51 Gerhard Reaching Consensus on Television 145 Scheumann, founder and first moderator of the.