Christina von Hodenberg. Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945-1973. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006. 512 S. EUR 46.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-8353-0029-3.

Reviewed by Joe Perry (Department of History, Georgia State University)
Published on H-German (September, 2007)

"Back then, dealing with criticism was entirely uncharted territory." This comment by television reporter Alfred Krogmann, who cut his teeth in the early 1960s on the television news show Panorama, in many ways goes to the heart of Christina von Hodenberg's impressive new book on the West German public sphere in the decades after World But, as he looked back on a career in broadcasting in 1990, his reflections captured the embattled and ultimately successful attempts by members of his generation of media workers to bring what contemporaries called Zeitkritik (topical or timely criticism) to a wide audience in print, radio, and television. As Hodenberg shows, political consensus dominated postwar West German media productions well into the 1950s. Conservative functionaries in the Adenauer government and media executives and reporters--who rose to prominence in the 1930s and maintained their positions despite allied re-education and denazification campaigns--valued allegiance to the Obrigkeitsstaat. Working together, government and media institutions and authorities ensured that what Hodenberg calls the "media public sphere" rarely questioned state authority. Yet by the early 1960s, the media and its workers had profoundly altered the public sphere: politics was no longer controlled by state institutions but was rather up for grabs, and national "integration through conflict" replaced "integration through consensus" as the overriding norm in public discourse (p. 459). Media products challenged the most cherished notions of the Adenauer consensus--deference to the state, demonization of East Germany, silence about Nazi criminality--and an audience eager for political debate approved of and expected this new critical stance. In her detailed and fascinating analysis, Hodenberg probes the reasons for this fundamental transformation. Why and how did Zeitkritik and political debate become the norm in the West German mass media? What did media workers and institutions contribute to the construction of a critical and democratic public sphere and ultimately to the arrival of a liberal, stable democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)?

These are questions with consequences, given the pathologies of Germany's twentieth century and the still-surprising national reconstruction that turned the FRG into a pluralistic, liberal, and cosmopolitan society. Explaining German history's relatively recent "happy ending" has been a central topic for historians of postwar Germany.[1] Hodenberg shifts away from established narratives about the arrival of a seductive consumer culture that resolved political tension and relieved West Germans of the burdens of the past. Instead she focuses on the media, and in her account, newspapers, television shows, radio broadcasts, and illustrated magazines are more than the delivery vehicles of consumer culture. The mass media, Hodenberg writes, was a collective social forum for the debate and promulgation of values and norms, central to the process of West German democratization and "westernization." The story proceeds, chapter by chapter, across three decades of generational change. Cohorts of media figures and government employees--Wilhelminians, Nazis, 45ers, and 68ers--confront and replace each other across well-defined chronological "eras": the occupation years, the "short 1950s," and the "long 1960s."[2] Along the way, Hodenberg sheds new light on the causes of West German democratization and challenges a number of mid-level, "common sense" historical assumptions.

This is an institution- and particularly an actor-driven history, with a firm foundation in social and cultural theory. Readers will learn much about news magazines like Der Spiegel, major broadcasting companies like WDR and NDR, and media conglomerates like the Springer newspaper empire. They can browse a veritable "Who's Who" of media moguls, reporters, and editors; radio and television producers and talking heads; intellectuals and academics; and lobbyists and government ministers--all sorted into generations that battled over prominence and position. Hodenberg brings these institutions and characters to life with thorough research in national archives in Germany and the United States and in the private archives of a number of West German broadcasting companies, a challenging task since the strong federal system of the FRG left its federal states with separate broadcasting companies. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of a "journalistic field" provides one of the book's mainsprings. As media elites struggled for individual and generational cultural capital, they remade the media landscape. The notion of the public sphere, derived loosely from Jürgen Habermas, provides another. Hodenberg describes the public sphere with much enthusiasm, using adjectives like modern, democratic, western, and liberal. She approvingly cites Habermas's attempt to imagine "the emancipatory power of the political public sphere and the ideal goal of the broadest possible democratic participation" (p. 17). Yet she critiques Habermas for being rooted in cultural pessimism and too focused on the print media. Hodenberg favors instead a "pragmatic model" of the public sphere, defined rather uncritically as a "medium for the self reference of a society, an arena in which collective representations are generated, and values and conflicts of interest are made evident and resolved" (p. 17).

The notion of the public sphere is a productive relationship between democratic politics and the mass media in the FRG. Contemporaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s certainly thought so. Readers in the United States are probably familiar with Habermas's classic Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), but as Hodenberg shows, his was only one voice in a larger chorus. In a valuable chapter on "Intellectual Conceptions of the Public Sphere," Hodenberg carefully reconstructs the terms of debate. To simplify things, conservatives drew on the precepts of Carl Schmitt; their views predominated during most of the 1950s. On this model, the "national idea" received top priority, liberal individualism was taboo, and the mass media was supposed to be "an organ of acclamation" (Akklamationsorgen) for political unity under the auspices of a strong central state (p. 44). As Joseph Kaiser, one of Schmitt's younger followers, put it in 1956, the public sphere was the field where "the Volk becomes conscious and sure of its unity as a nation, in which state and society come together" (p. 47). A generation of left-leaning "45ers" (born between 1921 and 1932, including intellectuals like Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Reinhart Koselleck), fearful of resurgent totalitarianism, argued instead for a liberal public sphere open to democratic contests. By the mid-1960s, the "68er generation" (born between 1933 and 1945) were warning of the manipulative aspects of "the culture industry" and calling for a "critical public sphere" as a counter to both conservative and liberal norms.

This careful reconstruction of contemporary debates offers substantial insight into the roots of current cultural criticism and provides the background for the systematic investigation of the media that follows. Immediately after the war, Allied occupiers and particularly U.S. bureaucrats recognized the importance of remaking German society through the democratization of the values and structures of the press and broadcast media. They cultivated new cadres of media workers, supposedly untainted by National Socialism, to replace what contemporaries called "die Ehemaligen," the "formers" made suspect by their complicity with the Nazis. The "Wegweiser zu gutem Journalismus," a ten-page "fair practice guide" distributed to editors by the U.S. military government in Bavaria, laid out American-style standards and practices for German emulation (pp. 134-138). Yet, Hodenberg asserts, there was no "Stunde Null of the press," as others have argued (p. 101). Despite halting attempts to denazify media staff, members of the Nazi generation maintained important positions. The "formers" were even supported at work by their younger and/or less politically suspect colleagues, and although the groundwork was laid for later change, it would take a decade to arrive.

In the "short 1950s" consensus journalism dominated the public sphere. Administrators in the Adenauer government wanted a non-questioning, non-critical attitude from the press. Except for outliers in Der Spiegel and some radio broadcasts, they usually got it. The government sought public compliance in a number of ways. Adenauer recognized the importance of wooing the press and discussed issues of the day with selected reporters in carefully orchestrated "tea chats" (Teegespräche). The chancellor's Bundespresse- und Informationsamt (BPA) engaged in propaganda campaigns for CDU/CSU agendas. The BPA surveilled press, radio, and television reports for correct attitudes, and actively encouraged conservative journalists with easy access to government representatives and monetary support from the notorious "reptile fund" (pp. 158-170). When the administration took umbrage over specific reports or reporters, it pressured editors to make requisite changes in style or staff. As a result, television news shows, cinema newsreels, and illustrated magazines did little to confront regime politics. Editors at Der Spiegel, influenced by U.S. examples of organization and approach, were more willing to provide a critique of regime prerogatives. Spiegel remained something of an exception to consensus-dominated journalism, an early sign of the new direction. This attitude hardly won favor with the authorities. Reacting to a story about CDU contacts with the French secret service, which ran in Spiegel in 1952, Adenauer privately yearned for the confiscation of the offending issues and fumed "criticism ok, but this dirtiness, such dirty things, that's impossible" (p. 223). A decade later, Adenauer had apparently had enough, and the government cracked down on the magazine in the infamous "Spiegel Affair" of October 1962.

By then, though, times had changed: the years bracketing 1960 had witnessed the rise to prominence of the 45ers and the liberal values and practices they professed. Historians often describe the Spiegel Affair as a turning point in the democratization of the FRG. As Hodenberg convincingly shows, it was only the best-known and indeed a relatively late example of a series of well-publicized political and media scandals that undermined the older generation's conservative consensus. "The time of affairs" began not in 1962, but rather in 1958, when media workers began to push against the boundaries of official tolerance. The government continued to use legal and/or illegal means to repress disagreeable reports and reporters. But the negative publicity generated by heavy-handed attempts at censorship worked against regime agendas and the tacit consensus that had masked the administration's control melted away. Generational change also worked against the status quo. Assisted by the fading of older cohorts and an expanding economy, which opened positions at the top, a wave of youthful and progressive if still mostly male professionals took over influential positions in radio, television, and print media. The 45ers adroitly used political scandals and "affairs" in their battles with their elders for position and cultural capital and so hastened the arrival of a dynamic, critical public sphere (pp. 324-25). The still-new medium of television was on the cutting edge, particularly television news programs like Panorama and Report . Leftist authors and intellectuals from "Gruppe 47" and the Frankfurt School found new public visibility; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno--along with other familiar figures--appeared regularly on radio and television and became sought-after media stars (p. 289).

Zeitkritik was the fashionable if still contested buzzword of the day. News stories increasingly focused critically on internal German affairs. Hot topics included the moral and financial costs of rearmament, the persistence of social injustice despite the gains of the "economic miracle," and the scandals that rocked public opinion and battered public faith in the administration. Yet, there were limits to Zeitkritik. The 45ers, Hodenberg writes, maintained the paternalism of the previous era. They wanted to teach and protect "the masses" and "the simple man" (known to opinion pollsters as the stereotyped everyman "Uncle Fritz" and his easily duped wife "Lieschen Müller"), not offer them full democratic participation. For the government, the new generation of media staff was nonetheless filled with "eccentric leftists" (p. 310). By the mid-1960s, the public sphere was polarized between new Left radicals and conservatives represented by the Springer companies. West Germans were also becoming increasingly tolerant of divergent and critical opinions. The 68ers did not break radically with their elders, according to Hodenberg. Instead, they continued the trends already set in motion by the 45ers. "The crisis of the early 1960s thus passed over into the transformative phase of the late 1960s and 1970s," she concludes; "[t]he departure from consensus flowed into the model of integration through conflict" (p. 439). After two decades of crisis and confusion, West Germans had constructed a "discursive, critical public sphere" that guaranteed pluralism, tolerance, and the endurance of democratic "western" values (p. 460).

This ambitious book includes a remarkable level of detail and follows a convincing narrative arc. I have some reservations, however, about Hodenberg's organizing concepts. Her argument is wound tightly around generational conflicts (45ers vs. 68ers, for example) and familiar periodization (the short 1950s, long 1960s, and so on). Though she is careful to note continuities in ideas and institutions across these divides (historians often exaggerate the sharpness of generation and chronological change, she suggests on p. 10), I suspect that the transformations that organize her story were not always as clear or definite as she concludes.

More importantly, Hodenberg relies on comparisons between the FRG and the United States and Britain that recall arguments about the German Sonderweg. Her story moves towards a comfortable resolution: the arrival in the FRG of a modern, western, tolerant public sphere, supposedly already evident in the United States or Britain. The FRG clearly underwent an important historical transformation, and one that requires critical investigation. Yet repeated gestures toward an "Anglo-American" model leave one wondering about explanatory slippage between the ideal nature of "the public sphere"--which for Hodenberg seems to have built-in values and an implicit "modernizing" teleology--and the actual shape of West German and American mass media institutions. One could argue (and sometimes Hodenberg does) that the U.S. media followed similar trajectories as the West German media in the 1950s and 1960s, moving from consensus to conflict, from conservatism to liberalism. Structures and practices may have been more democratic in the United States than in West Germany--American occupation authorities certainly liked to think so--but the U.S. media landscape in the 1950s was hardly a model of democratic openness. In a similar vein, in Hodenberg's account, the FRG "modernized": it became a progressive, liberal, democratic society. Similar definitions of modernity are often used uncritically by historians of West (and particularly East) Germany. Yet, the seemingly self-evident connections between modernity and progress that underlie such usage are problematic. Critiques of modernization theory, arguments about the "modernity" of National Socialism, and recent critiques of the concept of modernity itself (to name just several examples) call into question the assumptions built in to this analytical frame.[3]

Hodenberg admires Habermas's vision of a liberal public sphere but rejects his critical view of the same, because it is tainted by the conspiratorial cultural theories of the Frankfurt School. It thus comes as no surprise that she has harsh words for the cultural criticism of the 68ers. Though they made room for increased popular participation in politics, Hodenberg writes, their neo-Marxist ideology was a step backwards from the ideas championed by the 45ers in the late 1950s. The 68ers returned to outdated "anti-liberal and anti-parliamentarian resentment" inherited from Weimar-era anxieties and Carl Schmitt (p. 77). Critiques of the "culture industry" no doubt suffered from elitism and overstated the malleability of the masses, as Hodenberg suggests. They also called attention to the inequities of corporate control and limits to pop-media conglomerates after World War II, something she ignores. From a critical perspective, the "democratic" public sphere lionized in her book is itself an ideological construct that performs a legitimizing function for (liberal) regime agendas, at the very least by limiting public debate to acceptable terms.

The ideal-typical public sphere model adopted by Hodenberg raises difficult questions--this is one of the book's virtues. Konsensus und Krise is a compelling, original history of West German "westernization" in the postwar decades, rich with fact, insight, and argument. Hodenberg has written an indispensable account of the mass media in these years, and made a lively and welcome contribution to ongoing debates about the public sphere as both lived practice and analytical category.

Notes

[1]. Michael Geyer, "In Pursuit of Happiness: Consumption, Mass Culture, and Consumerism," in idem and Konrad Jarausch, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 314.

[2]. For this familiar periodization see, for example, Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten. Freizeit, Massenmedien und 'Zeitgeist' in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (Hamburg: Christians, 1995); Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek, eds., Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau. Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre (Bonn: Dietz, 1998).

[3]. For a valuable critique of the concept of modernity see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 113-149.

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Citation: Joe Perry. Review of von Hodenberg, Christina, Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945-1973. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13623

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