Massenmedien im Kalten Krieg: Akteure, Bilder, Resonanzen (review)

German academic publishers are indefatigable in providing paradise-like environments for conference volumes. Almost no major academic conference or workshop held in Germany is left unprinted. As long as conveners of academic events are successful in obtaining funds to cover the entrepreneurial risks, academic publishers willingly serve as mere printing presses. Although this situation is advantageous in disseminating the fruits of academic discourse, it leads on the other hand to constant inundation with volumes irrespective of selective criteria. This pertains not only to volumes as a whole but also to almost any individual presentation at conferences or workshops. Participation in such gatherings entitles authors to be represented in the subsequent volume. As a result, the German-language market of academic publications is flooded with conference volumes, most of which are mixed bags in the truest sense of the word.

Massenmedien im Kalten Krieg (Mass Media in the Cold War) is anything but an exception to these general rules. The book includes papers from a workshop held in May 2003 at the Center for Contemporary History Research (known under its German acronym ZZF) as the culmination of a project on “Mass Media during the Cold War,” which was funded by a multiyear grant. Contributors to the volume include the main participants in the project and other scholars who were invited to take part in the 2003 workshop. As a result, the reader is confronted with eight diverse and sometimes narrow case studies set in East or West Germany from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. At least three of the essays extend their focus to German-German comparisons or intersections between East and West Germany.

With no barrier of language and the absence of a physical border in divided Berlin until August 1961, vigorous media efforts to win the hearts and minds of the population both at home and in the rival German state emerged naturally from the situation on the ground. Yet the building of the Berlin Wall sealed Germany’s division for an indefinite period and also signaled the limited relevance of media for the Cold War. Hearts and minds hardly mattered when interests of realpolitik and power from the guns carried the day in an age of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Although the editor, Thomas Lindenberger, convincingly explains in his introduction why the mass media played a role in Cold War history and attempts to sketch in the “big picture,” many of the essays that follow do no more than outline their respective subjects in great detail. Otherwise they make no contribution to any volume coherence or overarching questions, and neither do they claim to prove the relevance of their topics to the development of the Cold War or its historiography.

Individual preferences will determine what each reader gets out of the “mixed bag” on offer. For those who may want to avoid excessively narrow German discourses, the essays that will likely be of greatest interest are those by Ulrike Weckel on German film director Wolfgang Staudte, by Bernd Stöver on one of East Germany’s most successful propaganda films (For Eyes Only), by Lars Karl on the reaction in East Germany to Soviet war movies, and by Thomas Heimann on the foreign programs shown on East German television. Of more specialized interest are essays by Marcus Payk on the extremely radical (and thus marginal) West German anti-Communist publicists William S. Schlamm and Winfried Martini, and by Christine Bartlitz on Walter Adolph, a hapless Catholic “media prelate” from West Berlin. In addition, Uta C. Schmidt delivers a cogent treatise on neglected children (Schlüsselkinder) as a feature of debate for intra-German gender politics during the Cold War, and Uta Schwarz compares representations of ideology and gender in East German and West German newsreels (Wochenschau) in the 1950s.

During the first postwar decade, Wolfgang Staudte was a quintessential German film director, living in West Berlin but producing his work with the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft in Potsdam. His political pieces (Der Untertan, Rotation, Rosen...