This fine collection of essays revolves around a central insight: media audiences are not a homogenous mass. Newspaper readers, radio listeners, and movie watchers bring their social and cultural identities to their media experiences. People of diverse classes and political persuasions cheer at different parts of a film, watch the same television show differently, and consume different music. This insight may appear self-evident today, but this has not always been the case. Generations of writers have focused on the stultifying and homogenizing tendencies of mass culture. While scholars are beginning to question the “media as manipulation” perspective, Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross rightly detect that this critical stance needs further development. The fourteen essays in this volume therefore situate the German media and its audience in a wider historical context and question the power of radio, film, newspapers, books, and television to reflect and forge social unity.

In approaching this volume, one might question the advantages of addressing universal developments in mass media through a national lens. But the editors remind us that because of its tumultuous recent history—defined by war, political rupture, and social dislocation—Germany represents an especially useful case study in the power and resonance of mass media. How have the media been utilized in democracies and dictatorships? To what extent were governments and social critics able to use mass media to shape social and political consensus? In answering these questions, this volume showcases original research on Weimar, the Nazi years, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

The book is divided into three sections, each devoted to a particular medium: music and broadcasting; film and television; and print media. In part one, Corey Ross's opening chapter on the development of recorded music combines the history of technology with an examination of elite perceptions. Before 1933, he shows, critics debated the commercial and cultural implications of the gramophone and tried to control its reception, while after 1933 the Nazi regime conceded its popularity and realized they had very little power to regulate it. Detlef Siegfried turns our attention to the record industry in 1960s West Germany, noting like Ross how the medium of recorded sound, particularly pop and rock (“countercultural” music), depended on the commercialism that it ostensibly opposed. Kate Lacey moves our attention to the first decade of radio listening in the 1920s. She teases out the utopian and political aspirations of radio listeners, as workers gathered to listen to public broadcasts, thus forging a collective sense of empowerment. Meanwhile through radio, women became more attuned to their domestic roles as visions of luxury and liberation were channeled into their homes. In his exploration of radio and ideology, Konrad Dussel rounds out the section on sound media by linking the interwar and post-World War II years. While the Weimar years and the early years of the FRG saw cultural elites trying to utilize radio as a tool to educate the masses, the Nazis saw it instead as a medium for escapist entertainment.

Karl Christian Führer leads off the section on visual media with a similar insight about entertainment. His focus on American movies in Nazi Germany reveals a socially complex picture. Audiences in larges cities were more receptive to Hollywood films than rural Germans, while the regime both competed with and relied on American films to offer a glimpse of the “normal” as an alternative to heavy-handed propagandizing. Thomas Lindenberger also addresses German media in terms of national competition—not only with the United States but also between two German states during the Cold War. By looking at movies about cross-border travel, espionage thrillers, and films about socialism, Lindenberger reveals that the GDR was fixated on West German cinema as the standard by which it measured its own achievements. Despite the seeming dominance of FRG cinema, in both countries movies were losing ground in popularity to television, the subject of the next three essays. Knut Hickethier pays particular attention to the relationship between television viewing in the FRG and shifting ideas about work, entertainment, and escapism. In their focus on sports broadcasting, Judith Keilbach and Markus Stauff build on the insight that television reflects shifting mores and social differentiation, but they also recognize the power of the medium to create a sense of national belonging. Heather Gumbert shifts our attention to the GDR, where she sees more state intervention in television broadcasting than in the West. But she refuses to reduce GDR television to a form of indoctrination, instead arguing that television shows acknowledged what citizens were already experiencing on an everyday basis.

One of the strengths of this volume is that it joins anxieties surrounding radio, television, and film with anxieties about print culture. Bernhard Fulda reveals the tabloids of Weimar as a medium of political scandal and sensationalism. But, he argues, rather than being a simple pandering to the masses, these publications primarily served a political function, as socialists, conservatives, and Nazis used tabloids to stir up passions and educate their publics about a political worldview. Gideon Reuveni also accesses the anxieties that surrounded the consumption of newspapers as an overly “commercial” medium that pandered to the masses through quick headlines and advertisements. Habbo Knoch reveals a simultaneous concern about photojournalism, which, according to critics such as Walter Benjamin, fostered a superficiality of thought through the destruction of the artistic aura. Finally, Patrick Major reminds us that fears of “smut and trash” persisted well into the postwar years in East and West Germany, when attacks on pulp fiction led to censorship and even book burnings.

In all of these essays, we feel both the excitement and the fear unleashed by mass media. While social elites felt German Kultur was under assault by mass entertainment, in some cases government officials had a better sense of what would make the population content and, in turn, secure their own political fortunes. This and other continuities in German mass media history beg for more analysis, and the editors use their introduction to lay out a research agenda. Their call for more work on media and the city, and the media and celebrity, is enticing, but it seems halfhearted compared to their final appeal for a more differentiated view of audiences. To this agenda one might add other lines of inquiry. How have producers accessed the desires of their audiences through surveys and consumer research? Has technology always survived its enemies and confounded its critics, or have there been occasions when detractors halted a media innovation? Finally, while we are rightly complicating a unidirectional view of the media, is there nothing more to say about the power of commercial culture to depoliticize its audiences? This book has laid the fertile ground for future discussion along these lines.