According to Stewart Anderson, German television dramas in the 1950s and 1960s were a means of re-moralizing Germany in the postwar era, a path to “reinvent” the nation and overcome the past. Anderson urges historians to take televisual fictional narratives seriously and conceive of the new medium of television as an “agent of change in its own right” (7), based on its mass appeal and its importance among elites dedicated to institutional and cultural rebuilding. The comparative analysis of East and West German television fictional dramas—both similarities and differences in narrative topics and themes among the productions in each German state—constitute a “common, German-wide discourse” extending beyond the antagonisms of the Cold War (11). Fictional television dramas in both countries presented “individual strategies for managing and implementing political ideologies” (67) and offered a variety of opportunities for audiences to choose role models, ethical values, and possibilities for negotiating the conflicts of the Cold War, rebuilding the country, and gaining a political education.

Each of the five chapters in the book focuses on specific themes in the pursuance of each country's “moral reinvention” (6) by analyzing exemplary television films and teleplays. However, these are also cross-referenced and discussed in other chapters, where the topics are relevant. Each theme compares and contrasts one or two major productions in each German state, but also includes shorter discussions of other television dramas in less detail to reinforce or expand the main theses of the chapters.

Out of the more than 3000 teleplays from the period between 1956 and 1970, Anderson selected thirty-one productions from the East and forty-two from the West. Popularity of the respective films among audiences was one major selection criterion, based on the dubious—because of their coincidental and random collection in the television archives—criterion of the content or quantity of letters from the public to the respective television stations. In addition, quantitative methods such as the Infratest surveys initiated in 1963 in the West were later incorporated into audience measurements. Anderson also included both positive or negative responses by critics in important political, cultural, religious, or media institutions.

Chapter 1 focuses on how televisual representations of the Nazi period depicted perpetrators as idiosyncratically distinct characters while constructing redemptive stories about heroes resisting or rescuing victims of Nazi actions. Both East and West German historical television films urged Germans to empathize with and follow the example of anti-Nazi protagonists, who embodied democratic and tolerant values and were “good” Germans who supported the international struggle against fascism. In this manner, they would achieve both individual and national redemption.

Chapter 2 scrutinizes television dramas which promoted abstract ideals such as democracy and civil society, but also indoctrinated viewers on Cold War politics by denouncing the opposing side as either continuing the totalitarian traditions of the Nazis (in the GDR) or promoting German militarism through the FRG joining NATO. The productions acknowledged the necessity of post-Nazi political reorientation and reeducation, and portrayed specific responses to political oppression perpetrated by the “other” German state. Anderson shows how the films in this chapter presented “choices, role models and a concrete set of ethical guidelines” (66) valorizing and validating postwar political role models such as the long tradition of the “righteous fugitive” (67).

Chapter 3 studies the respective televisual responses to the challenges of consumer culture proliferating in the West and sought after in the East, by warning of the dangers posed by immoral decadence and excess such as in the Weimar Republic, but with East German productions promoting a notion of non-decadent socialist affluence. Opposition to a decadent consumerism was driven in the West by an alliance of conservative clergy with mainstream political parties, while this orientation was pursued in the East under Marxist pretexts. One great strength of Anderson's scrutiny of the role of the established religions in both German states is the extent to which the influence of the churches was manifested in and through television productions. Both as members of regional broadcasting councils (Rundfunkräte) in the West and as social and cultural critics of media outlets allied to the churches, the clergy could emerge seemingly unscathed to exercise their moral, cultural, and historical authority in spite of their questionable relationships to the Nazi government. Anderson analyzes the role of religious authorities and religion in televisual narratives by scrutinizing the dramas Ein gewisser Judas (SWF, 1958), Die Beichte (1970), and Waldhausstr. 20 as well as the film comedy Seelenwanderung (WDR, 1962). The coincidence of conservative religious elite anti-materialism and anti-consumerism with ostensibly Marxist critiques of capitalist decadence and excess of the West German Wirtschaftswunder is one of the surprises of this chapter.

Chapter 4 dwells primarily on East German depictions of male and female gender roles. The author lists three common threads to portrayals of gender in the 1950s and 1960s: the idealization of the nuclear family; the reinvention of masculinity to counteract the de-masculinization of the prisoner of war trope in the postwar period; and exploration of women's equality and liberation (128). Helmut Sakowski's 1960 teleplay, Steine im Weg, focuses on the conflicts involved in the collectivization of East German agriculture. Anderson relates how the ending of the play was revised at the personal urging of Walter Ulbricht after the Berlin Wall was built, so that the main male character, who left his wife and went to the West after his wife joined a collective farm, was induced to remain in the GDR. In this production, the primary female character was gendered with male characteristics in her dress and personality qualities in order to depict women as equal partners in the construction of socialism. Other Sakowski productions such as Die Entscheidung der Lena Mattke (DFF, 1958) and Sommer in Heidkau (DFF, 1964) also portray the tribulations of working women trying to establish their own identities outside of the home, enabled by the advantages of socialist society.

In contrast to the extensive discussion of creating women's equality in East German productions, Anderson's summary discussion of West German television points out that these adhere more closely to traditional gender relationships, in which equal rights do not necessarily entail freedom for either partner. According to Anderson, East German representations also reinforced traditional gender roles, with women as the custodians of domestic spaces.

Chapter 5 covers topics related to television dramas on race and ethnicity. Anderson describes how fictional television dramas presented progressive, anti-racist versions of tolerance and acceptance focusing primarily on non-German Europeans, guest workers, and Jews. Anderson asserts that televisual depictions of race, ethnicity, and otherness presented models of behavior that diverged from the racist attitudes and hierarchies of the Nazi period, in a situation where new behavioral patterns had not yet developed to replace them. This led to both a new delineation of acceptable prejudices but also advocacy of tolerance toward non-Germans. While East German productions like Menschen helfen Menschen (DFF, 1963) tended to downplay religious and racial differences as unimportant for the construction of socialism and overcoming Nazi racism, Anderson states that the GDR authorities denied the persistence of Nazi prejudices. West German television productions urging tolerance, on the other hand, were produced against the background of West German integration into NATO and integrating guest workers who entered the country from the mid-1950s to the 1970s. Anderson ultimately remains pessimistic about the effectiveness of television dramas focusing on race, ethnicity, and otherness due to continued popular intolerance, prejudice, and racial hierarchization handed down from the Nazi period.

However, Anderson avoids discussing important aspects of political, cultural, and historical contextualization of these narratives. Sometimes the televisual narratives seem to be divorced from overarching discourses that structured the general relationship between the two German states. For instance, how did the West German Hallstein doctrine, and the boycott of East German industry and political recognition of the East German government affect televisual narratives? (How) did the 11th Plenary Session of the SED in 1965 influence the production of television narratives? Excluding these issues detaches the televisual discourse from other narrative forms and discourses and isolates its effects on audiences, the SED, and critics. Finally, the topic of youth culture is conspicuously absent in the comparative analysis of television fiction in both German states.

In spite of these weaknesses, Stewart Anderson has made a very substantial contribution to the comparative study of German culture of the 1950s and 1960s by providing a map of cultural values and discursive positions in television narratives, which were both shared and contested in the postwar struggle for cultural and political legitimacy. Anderson also gives a selective yet informative overview of some of the main areas of conflict, similarities, and differences over the path toward democracy and economic well-being, pointing out how the narratives on gender, post-Nazi “coming to terms with the past,” racial and ethnic relations, as well as individual responsibility in society were depicted. The book's special value lies in its treatment of televisual narratives with the same seriousness other researchers have afforded to literature, film, and drama. Anderson points to gaps to be filled in future research on the history of televisual fictional narratives, which should attain the same level of quality as this study.