In Envisioning Socialism, Heather Gumbert analyzes how television shaped social relations and culture in East Germany, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Her history of East German television could have confirmed popular assumptions about a dreary and grey world trapped behind the Iron Curtain. After all, television producers struggled to produce popular programs, and they still broadcast largely in black and white as late as 1989. She instead provides a more colorful history of negotiation between producers and audiences that sometimes resulted in popular programming.

Gumbert challenges interpretations of television that emphasize the state's suffocating control of television, such as Günter Holzweissig's Die schärfste Waffe der Partei (2002). To that end, Gumbert explores how technological particularities, political agendas, and audience expectations combined to mold East German television—with audience expectations playing a starring role in her account. She persuasively argues that cultural authorities employed a strategy that was constructive rather than destructive. Rather than simply repressing undesired voices, they pursued political enlightenment in ways that appealed to the desires of the audience. In fact, state authorities and audiences eventually came to agree on the look and feel of a “good” program and did so at the expense of avant-garde artistic visions for television. While the state continued to communicate its values and benefited from the resulting stabilization of society, the ways that television programming evolved “ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating” (1).

After a first chapter that explores the initial technological obstacles to securing airwaves, the second chapter focuses on early television programming in the 1950s. Gumbert tells a fascinating story of producers, writers, and actors struggling to understand the limitations, conventions, and possibilities of the young medium. Authorities sought out politically appropriate programming, but also had to fill the daily schedule, operate on a limited budget, and capture an audience in both German states. Entertainment programming emerged as an important solution to all these goals, and the television service learned to incorporate political messages in subtle ways.

The third and fourth chapters explore television coverage of the major political crises that occurred in 1956 and 1961. Television programming barely acknowledged the events of the Hungarian uprising, but, according to Gumbert, authorities did not silence news about the Hungarian uprising in order to discourage reformers within the government. Rather, television producers had yet to develop the technical means or procedural rules necessary to cover topical or live events, and the state immediately regretted its silence. In the wake of 1956, the regime thus worked less to hide the truth than to develop means of telling its own version of the truth in a way that appealed to as wide an audience as possible. The next challenge was the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. As Gumbert argues in a compelling fourth chapter, news coverage of this event on East Germany's Aktuelle Kamera borrowed heavily from the narrative strategies of entertainment programming, such as popular crime thrillers. Audience expectations for entertainment thus shaped news programming, which, in turn, influenced how East Germans interpreted political events.

Chapter five, the most crucial chapter of the book, reconsiders key moments of censorship in the 1960s. Here Gumbert tells the story of Fetzer's Flight, a television opera denounced by authorities in Neues Deutschland and other venues. When authorities demanded that television producers apologize on air for the broadcast, their attack against the program had less to do with its political content or its creators’ commitment to building socialism: party leaders and audiences alike rejected the opera on aesthetic grounds. Given popular complaints about the show's experimentation with television conventions, the regime worried more that the show failed to communicate political messages effectively. To reach the public, programming needed to be popular and entertaining.

The final chapter reveals how programming had abandoned any pretense of a proletarian revolutionary transformation of culture. Shows such as the popular Prisma series allowed audiences to feel by the late 1960s as if they could criticize the state and even convinced some viewers that television programmers were “on their side.” Gumbert also asserts that some programs revealed the resurgence of “bourgeois” values. For Gumbert, such popular programming was not merely an attempt to manipulate and appease audiences in exchange for their acquiescence to authority. While the state produced stability by appeasing popular desires, it also abandoned utopian goals and made concessions to various audiences. In other words, this was not a powerful state masterfully controlling a passive population. As Gumbert writes, television “projected a socialist ‘dreamworld’ that was defined not by the state's vision of socialism but by a cultural compromise between previously competing visions of socialism that originated from a number of different (if disproportionate) centers of power” (152).

Even though authorities abandoned their utopian hopes that television could revolutionize society, Gumbert concludes that the medium nonetheless contributed to a unique culture that differed from that of the West. Viewers did not dismiss East German programs as mere propaganda to be avoided in favor of Western offerings; they even cherished certain programs as compelling reflections of their lives. This consensus was short-lived, however. By the 1980s the East German television service had to rely increasingly on foreign programming to overcome the “tyranny of the television schedule” (161). In other words, programmers struggled to fill a daily schedule with distinctly “East German” entertainment. It is unfortunate that this last point only comes in the conclusion: an in-depth discussion of East Germany's final two decades might have revealed much more about how the distinctiveness and appeal of East German television decreased over time.

Historians of the GDR increasingly draw on anthropology and cultural studies to understand specific East German notions of community and selfhood. Gumbert joins them in exploring the “nature of culture, power, and communication” (6). Though she contends that a distinct East German culture did emerge in the 1960s with the help of television, the book struggles to define the exact characteristics of that common identity or to show how different regions or social groups responded to television programming. For example, the comments on the resilience of bourgeois values in the final chapter might have benefitted from further discussion throughout the work. The topic receives very little attention up to that point, even though it suggests the coexistence of many different cultures or identities in the GDR. Envisioning Socialism is nevertheless a valuable and welcome contribution to the ongoing and incomplete study of East German cultural history.