Don't Need No Thought Control: Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Gerd Horten (review)

Gerd Horten has written a synthetic work that looks at West and East German mass media and consumer culture during the Honecker era and after. His work is firmly in the mainstream of recent work on the GDR, as he positions himself in line with the scholarship of Mary Fulbrook, Thomas Lindenberger, Andrew Port, and many others, offering a picture of a relatively weak dictatorship forced to respond to demands from below. He argues that GDR popular culture was driven by the desires of East Germans along with the systemic advantages of Western culture, which forced escalating and ultimately fatal accommodations by the SED leadership.

The scope of the book is perhaps its strongest point for the general reader, as Horten has chapters on film, television, popular music, and consumer culture. Horten uses petitions (Eingaben) as an effective source in these chapters, as well as a wide variety of other archival documents, but his analysis is familiar after numerous monographs on these subjects in recent decades. While reception is difficult to assess in a dictatorship, Horten sometimes engages in pure speculation that is distracting and unconvincing (71–73). These several case studies strengthen his overall arguments, and each chapter is framed almost identically, noting that SED policy was contradictory, defensive, and doomed to failure. A rather odd inclusion is the first chapter, which looks at "successful" GDR media campaigns around Vietnam and the 1972 Olympics. Horten appears to want to contrast these successes with the failures to come, but it is unclear how propaganda campaigns around clearly political issues are similar to the media and consumption case studies that follow.

A potentially revealing aspect of Horten's monograph is his focus on the underlying economic situation that greatly influenced GDR policy around film, television, and popular music. In each case, he demonstrates how SED leaders were caught in an impossible situation: because of growing economic difficulties, they had limited and decreasing funds to both produce appealing East German content and also purchase desired and appropriate Western cultural products. In the context of a seemingly clear preference for Western culture among East Germans (especially youth), functionaries were trapped in a downward spiral where they scrambled to provide acceptable Western cultural products to appease societal demand.

Horten describes well the slippery slope when the introduction and acceptance of Western media begat demands for more of it. Western films apparently earned more money for the budget because of their popularity. More details would have been most instructive on the fees for these Western products (in hard currency) and how that worked with ticket sales paid for in East German currency. (Horten points out repeatedly that the GDR's debt in foreign currency skyrocketed in this period.) Similarly, for television, GDR officials had increased the number of popular, domestically produced series across the 1970s and 1980s, but continued to rely on Western films as the backbone of programming. Again, though, more details on how paying in hard currency for the right to broadcast these films compared to the costs of domestic production is largely lacking.

There are several strategies that SED officials sought to employ in their battles for viewers and influence. Horten describes a number of examples, especially in the 1970s, where SED officials introduced Western films that were both popular and also critical of Western society—and hence ideologically acceptable and politically useful. It would be useful to know why this could not become a general and lasting model. And on the flip side, Horten also offers numerous examples of popular East German films and TV shows. A more granular economic examination of why SED officials could not spend more money on domestic cultural products, instead of paying hard currency for Western imports, would have been highly desirable.

The epilogue continues the study through the Wende and...