As historians of media will attest, television and radio audiences can be an elusive group, difficult to capture despite the quantitative work of audience research departments and consumer advocacy associations. Broadcasting history still relies heavily on state and private institutional sources, whereas documents with the voices of radio listeners represent only a modest share. For these reasons, studying millions of East German listeners who tuned in regularly to West German radio stations but never paid the requisite license fees is a daunting undertaking. Between 1949 and 1989, residents of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) illegally consumed Western broadcasts and print media—to the delight of the West and to the chagrin of leaders in the East.
These were no conventional broadcasting participants, as the Federal Republic of Germany has termed its national television and radio audiences in the context of the system of license fees meant to fashion the country's citizens into stakeholders. Yet, they were nothing if not engaged—with the border-crossing programs and publications, as much as with the antagonistic policies of their own state. The resulting mutual dependency between the dictatorship and its subjects, Kuschel argues in her book, engendered multiple public spheres. In these arenas, the state tested the limits of its control of the mediascape, and the citizenry flexed the muscles of its Eigen-Sinn (“self-will”). Like other recent histories of the GDR, Kuschel adopts Alf Lüdtke's influential term, Eigen-Sinn, not to trivialize the repressive nature of the dictatorship but rather to illuminate its community-building endeavor. In this endeavor, rearing the “ideal” media consumer was the goal of the state—and Eigen-Sinn the citizens’ only leverage. The ensuing analysis attempts to resolve a conundrum that scholarship of broadcasting reception shares with studies of dissidence: how receptive was the audience to the illicit swarm of ideas streaming in across the Iron Curtain, and what impact did these have? More concretely, did Western imports coming in over the airwaves contribute to the regime's collapse? The book answers this question in the affirmative, though it gives credit for the transformation not simply to the West but also to the choices and Eigen-Sinn of the East Germans themselves.
The author's argument proceeds along two lines. On the one hand, she examines the processes of mediatization—both technological, involving engineering innovations in areas from jamming to television, and political, pertaining to strategies and limits of state control. On the other, Kuschel plots the intersections among four key types of media, whereas other studies (e.g., Alexander Badenoch et al., eds., Airy Curtains in the European Ether: Broadcasting and the Cold War [2013] and Nicholas J. Schlosser, Cold War on the Airwaves: The Radio Propaganda War against Germany [2015]) typically focus on just one.
Under state socialism, Kuschel reminds us, the mass media enjoyed an overstated importance, and East Germany was no exception in this regard. One disadvantage was its opponent's possession of the same weapon. In this East-West competition, wooing the public was essential, and the book identifies three phases in East Germany's campaign to capture the hearts and minds of its populace. The first phase (1949–1961) was the consolidation of power under highly unpropitious circumstances, for the porous border between East and West Berlin allowed exposure to Western print materials and entertainment—for example, in Grenzkinos (border cinemas), which abutted the divide on the West German side and screened Western productions all day. The East German state spearheaded smear campaigns against the unwelcome import of specific institutions, such as Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), and against entire genres, like “Schund and Schmutz” (trivial and dirty) literature. Here Kuschel's findings echo those of Paweł Machcewicz, Poland's War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989 (2015) and Sonja Fritzsche, Science Fiction in East Germany (2006). But with the launch of television in 1952, the East German regime attempted its own media saturation campaign. Visuals, such as caricature series distributed by trade unions, that shamed illicit media consumers, were reasonably well received, but limited-frequency radio sets released in 1954 were a flop. Jamming was not uniformly successful, either. Following the uprising of June 1953, the state resorted to surveillance, denunciation, and searches, with the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) focusing its attention on the citizenry, politicizing private media use, and collecting “media-hygienic” pledges. In the shadow of the Nazi past, passing laws to criminalize private, though not public, consumption or possession of Western media proved impossible. The resulting legal vacuum weakened the state's grip on East German society in the long run.
The second phase, which followed the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and lasted until the political ascension of Erich Honecker in 1971, was the government's chance to reckon with the “mental border-crossers” (mentale Grenzgänger). At this point, the mandate to educate media consumers reached borderlands that had previously been neglected. There, regional party functionaries and youth groups were now recruited to police the possession of Western electronic equipment and even receivers produced in the GDR. Locals professed indifference or pushed back against official measures, as Sagi Schaefer has also shown in States of Division: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany (2014). There were even complaints about the state's failure to provide “entertainment, leisure, and information” (190). Officials responded with techno-administrative measures, such as bans on ultrahigh-frequency converters. Still, their reactions lagged behind the ingenuity of ordinary East Germans in evading such regulations.
The final phase (1971–1989) marked the regime's partial capitulation to the preferences of the citizenry. Under Honecker, the presence of Western media became an undeniable fact of life. Responding to the population's westward gaze, the new head of the regime announced that his compatriots would be judged according to their contributions to the state, not their media consumption practices. Although the change signaled the growing clout of East German audiences—opinion research demonstrated their overwhelming preference for Western programming—the government's denunciation of Western media continued. The outcome was a bifurcated picture, where East-West competition over color television coding technologies and satellite broadcasts, anti-Western propaganda (including the notoriously ideological television show Der schwarze Kanal), as well as the absence of Soviet-style glasnost, all coexisted uneasily with the government's increasing concessions to domestic media consumers.
Kuschel's study is remarkable for its detailed yet accessible account, which balances discussions of technologies and politics, juridical grey zones and East Germany's relevant geographical peculiarities, the East German state's pedagogical mandate, and its growing accommodation of citizens who talked back. The author uses sources from Germany's federal, provincial, and broadcasting archives, and consults several newspapers, as well as propaganda pamphlets, statistical surveys, and court proceedings. Careful to avoid a one-sided picture, she dwells on some of the GDR's own efforts to reach into West Germany with the help of films, print materials, and even broadcasts. For these reasons, Kuschel's work is an important study of cross-border media traffic in the East German context—yet, there is one glaring omission: the listeners, viewers, and readers themselves hardly take center stage. Kuschel has essentially written a book about the state, based predominantly on party, secret police, trade union, and local administrative documents—not a book about the populace. Few ordinary persons are mentioned, few anecdotes told, even fewer witness testimonies are heard; there is no use of oral history. The author rarely quotes verbatim, preferring to paraphrase, so that when one reads about listeners’ or viewers’ letters to broadcasters or about their complaints to the authorities, the tone is muffled by official responses and institutional acronyms. The promise of the title notwithstanding, the predicament of broadcasting history-writing, noted at the outset of this review, repeats itself here yet again.
