Jürgen Wilke, ed. Journalisten und Journalismus in der DDR: Berufsorganisation - Westkorrespondenten - "Der Schwarze Kanal". Medien in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2007. 313 pp. EUR 39.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-412-36205-8.

Reviewed by Garth Montgomery (Department of History, Radford University)
Published on H-German (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Reassessing GDR Media History

This twenty-third volume in Jürgen Wilke's series, Medien in Geschichte und Gegenwart, presents three master's theses from the Institut für Publizistik at the University of Mainz. The first, by Julia Martin, deals with the history of the Verband der Journalisten (VDJ), the professional organization of print and broadcast journalists in the GDR. The second, by Denis Fengler, explores the activities of West German newspaper and television correspondents in East Germany between 1972 and 1989. The third, by Marx Levasier, examines the work of Karl Eduard von Schnitzler, host of Schwarze Kanal, the East German television broadcast that aimed to counter the content of West German television. Across different media, all three contributions focus closely on the relationship between the practice of journalism and the exercise of political authority by the SED. This volume appears in the wake of a number of reassessments by historians of the relationship between political history and media history. Historians of the Kaiserzeit, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic, and the GDR have, of late, focused on the ways in which the expression--explicit or implicit--of political themes in print, radio, television, and film has been mediated by the distinctive properties--technological, formal, or institutional--of the media themselves, and by the ways in which audiences have read, listened to, and viewed media. To varying degrees, the works in this volume contribute to that reassessment.[1]

Using sources from the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv and from the Presseamt beim Vorsitzenden des Ministerrates der DDR im Bundesarchiv, Julia Martin traces the history of the VDJ. Her work details how the SED used this organization to control the journalistic profession in the GDR. What had originated in the Soviet Zone in 1945 as a trade union organization affiliated with the Free German Trade Union Federation was reconstituted by the SED in 1952 as an organization to advance the domestic and foreign policy aims of the party, one that infused professional journalistic training with Marxist-Leninist ideological instruction. With regard to the GDR's foreign relations, the VDJ focused its efforts on promoting good relations with journalists from the USSR and training Third World--primarily African--journalists. Martin examines the ways in which the SED used the VDJ to control the practice of journalism inside the GDR: through direct involvement of leading party figures in the operations of the VDJ, through the journal Neue Deutsche Presse, and through professional competitions and awards. The functions of the VDJ included control of admission to Leipzig's Fachschule für Journalistik, ideological oversight by regional committees, and the "coordination" of assignments in West Germany. While Martin does a thorough job of describing how these activities served to integrate the 85 percent of the 9,100 journalists who were SED members, she might have also focused more closely on the integrative function of the VDJ as it applied to the 15 percent of its membership who were not party members. Martin's detailed picture of the workings of the VDJ and its relations with the SED contains few surprises. The VDJ had no independence as a trade union; neither did it in any way represent the interests of journalists. Martin clearly outlines the organization's lack of public presence and influence on politics or state policy when it came to the relationship between the East German political authorities and the East German news media.

At the heart of Denis Fengler's "Westdeutsche Korrespondenten in der DDR" are interviews which he conducted with six West German journalists (from Deutsche Presse Agentur, major West German newspapers, and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen [ZDF]) who, after the conclusion of the Basic Treaty between the two German states, were stationed in the GDR at various points between 1972 and 1990. Fengler does a good job of situating the paradoxical status of West German correspondents in East Germany in historical context. He relates competing conceptions of the significance of the Basic Treaty to conflicting conceptions of the journalists' role. East German rhetoric about the "class conscious" mission of media, and about its function as an instrument of the "leading party," the SED, clashed sharply with West German ideas about involvement of journalists in the exploration of everyday life--"behind the ideology"--in East German society. Almost all of the reporting by West German correspondents--from coverage of the 1976 expulsion of Wolf Biermann to coverage of the religious peace movement and civil rights initiatives in the 1980s to attempts to follow leads from the daily paper Neues Deutschland or the nightly news broadcast Aktuelle Kamera--occasioned the same response from the East German authorities: charges of interference in the internal affairs of the GDR.

While not much new is found in Fengler's piece on organs of the East German state that oversaw the activities of West German journalists, the correspondents he interviewed offer interesting observations about the impact of contemporary reception of their reporting on their working conditions. West German television was accessible to viewers throughout 90 percent of the GDR, and, through the ZDF television program Kennzeichen D, coverage of domestic critics of the regime did reach the East German audience. During the last years of the GDR, when restrictions on direct contact between western correspondents and East German citizens were tightened, the working conditions of television correspondents grew significantly harder than those of western print journalists because East German television viewers were familiar with their faces. Despite increasing restrictions on West German journalists and what several correspondents conceded was a widespread lack of interest in GDR affairs on the part of West German readers, listeners, and viewers, the very presence of these correspondents suggested, in the minds of many westerners (including the journalists themselves), progress in inter-German relations. Several of the correspondents he interviewed made the case that their presence in the GDR not only strengthened contacts between the two Germanys, but also contributed to the recognition of commonalities between the states, as well as to the notion that people led normal lives in a state that had previously been considered deformed by ideology.

In effect, these West German journalists performed a balancing act, as talismans of détente who nonetheless positioned themselves in relationship to GDR internal affairs. That they ultimately were unable to do their job as they themselves conceived of it is not news. At the same time, however, Fengler's work offers intriguing insights into the correspondents' own thinking about contemporary working conditions and contemporary reception during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as their perspectives on the question--widely debated in the years since the collapse of the East German state--of the historical significance of their presence in the GDR.

Marc Levasier's "'Der schwarze Kanal': Entstehung und Entwicklung einer journalistischen Kontersendung des DDR-Fernsehens" focuses on the program itself, which integrated clips from West German television with tendentious commentary by the show's creator and host, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. Appearing in prime time every Monday evening from March 21, 1960, to October 30, 1989, Schnitzler served as the East German point-man in what Gunter Holzweissig has referred to as the East/West German "Ätherkrieg." Inspired, in large measure, by West German network Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD)'s broadcast Die Rote Optik, which aired clips from East German television, Schnitzler oriented Der schwarze Kanal to East German viewers who were already watching West German entertainment and new programs.

Levasier's sources consist of broadcast recordings and manuscripts from the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Potsdam; more specifically, recordings and transcripts of thirty-three installments of Der schwarze Kanal, twenty-five of which presented "border security" and the "anti-fascist protective wall" as the main topics. Levasier delineates the history of the broadcast with reference to thirty years' worth of evolving SED propaganda themes: from "Self-defense against the 'Frontstadt' West Berlin" to "Consolidation and Stability" to "Peaceful Coexistence" and "Unbridled Agitation" to--in the last days of the GDR--"The Greatest Offensive Against Socialism." Notwithstanding the fluctuating rhetorical emphases in Schnitzler's treatment of the Wall, West Berlin was always the "Pfahl im Fleisch der DDR." The author notes that, over the life of the broadcast, technological developments facilitated easier copying, editing, and display of West German TV footage, as well as footage from American feature films such as Rambo (1982). Nevertheless, the basic format remained largely unchanged, with Schnitzler's "talking head" delivering the main didactic points. This fact raises interesting questions about the relationship between explicit propaganda themes and both the formal properties of Der schwarze Kanal, and (where Levasier is able to evaluate reception of the broadcast) the behavior of East German viewers.

Levasier offers anecdotal evidence about Schnitzler's broadcast as the butt of jokes that circulated in the GDR. He also focuses on viewer mail and comments collected at public television forums, as well as data--in the form of responses to questionnaires sent weekly to roughly one thousand owners of registered television sets--collected by East German television's Abteilung Zuschauerforschung des DFF. According to these responses, Der schwarze Kanal consistently drew a 13 to 15 percent share of the audience tuned in to East German television and audience approval ratings between 2.6 and 3.5 on a 5-point scale. Viewer responses, broken down by gender, profession, and age, indicated that audience share and approval ratings were roughly double that among viewers over the age of sixty-five. Schnitzler's final broadcast, on October 30, 1989, drew a 12.3 percent share and a 4.77 percent approval rating. Indeed, one of the most provocative sections of Levasier's work deals with evaluation, by East German television authorities, of the program, its format, and its stagnant ratings. Throughout the 1980s, these evaluations expressed unwavering commitment to the idea of a counter-broadcast treatment of West German television. But questions--just questions, no action--about whether Schnitzler and his format were becoming out of date were raised with increasing frequency.

The author notes that Erich Honecker's calls in 1971 for "more entertaining" programming led to a superficial de-politicization of GDR television. And, while they didn't affect the form or content of Der schwarze Kanal, reforms in 1983 aimed at greater approximation of West German programming. Discussion by the East German authorities during the 1980s about the formal properties and the viewer reception of Der schwarze Kanal resonates provocatively with recent historical evaluations of the ways in which the expression--explicit or implicit--of political themes in print, radio, television, and film have been mediated by the distinctive properties of the media themselves, and by the ways in which audiences have read, listened to, and viewed them.

Note

[1]. With reference to television broadcasting and viewership in the GDR see, for example, Heather Gumbert, "Split Screens? Television in East Germany, 1952-89," in Mass Society, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karl Christian Fuehrer and Corey Ross (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 146-164.

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Citation: Garth Montgomery. Review of Wilke, Jürgen, ed., Journalisten und Journalismus in der DDR: Berufsorganisation - Westkorrespondenten - "Der Schwarze Kanal". H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24837

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