A Hitchhikers Guide to East German Television and to Its Fictional Productions 179
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Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen____ Empirischen______ Literaturwissenschaft Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Jg. 25 (2006), Heft 2 Peter Lang Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 2 Popular Culture and Fiction in four decades of East German Television hrsg. von / ed. by Uwe Breitenborn (Berlin) & Sascha Trültzsch (Halle) Die Heftbezeichnung SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 2 ist produktionstechnischen Gründen geschuldet und bezieht sich nicht auf das tatsächliche Erscheinungsjahr dieses Bandes, 2009. Dafür bittet die Redaktion um Verständnis. Das Heft wird zitiert: Uwe Breitenborn & Sascha Trültzsch (Hg.), 2009: Populär Culture and Fiction in four decades of East German Television. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. (= special issue SPIEL, 25 (2006), H. 2). Owing to technical reasons of production, the title SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 2 does not refer to the actual year of publication of this issue. The editorial team asks for the readers’ indulgence. The issue is cited as follows: Uwe Breitenborn & Sascha Trültzsch (Hg.), 2009: Popular Culture and Fiction in four decades of East German Television. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. (= special issue SPIEL, 25 (2006), H. 2). Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft Contents / Inhalt SPIEL 25 (2006), H. 2 Uwe Breitenborn (Berlin)/Sascha Trültzsch (Halle) Cold War, Cool Screens? Researching Popular Culture in East German television. A Short Introduction and preface 177 Henning Wrage (Berlin) A Hitchhikers Guide to East German Television and to its Fictional Productions 179 Ulrike Schwab (Halle) Fictional History Broadcasts in the GDR Television and their Concept of „Nation“ 191 Uwe Breitenbom (Berlin) Areas of the Past, Present and Future - Urban Landscapes in Non-fictional East German Entertainment Shows 201 Edward Larkey (Baltimore, Maryland) Popular Music on East German TV: Pop as Propaganda 207 Sascha Trültzsch (Halle) Changing Family Values from Strict Socialist to Bourgeois on East German TV 225 Thomas Wilke (Halle) Turntablerockers behind the Wall: The Early Years of Disco in the GDR between 1970 and 1973 235 Lutz Warnicke (Potsdam-Babelsberg) Sports on Television in the GDR in the 1980s. A Movement between the Political-driven Olympic Boycott 1984 and Growing Popularization 249 Markus Schubert & Hans-Jörg Stiehler (Leipzig) Program Structure Analysis of the GDR Television 1956 to 1991 259 RUBRIC Anne Bartsch (Halle) Kinder, Medien und Familie Zur Sozialisation von Emotionen in der Mediengesellschaft 273 10.3726/80108_179 SPIEL 25 (2006) H. 2, 179-190 Henning Wrage (Berlin) A Hitchhikers Guide to East German Television and to its Fictional Productions1 Der Essay versteht sich als eine Einführung in die Geschichte des DDR-Fernsehens beziehungs- weise des Deutschen Fernsehfunks, die in diesem Beitrag in vier Perioden eingeteilt wird. Die hier vorliegende Periodisierung ist angelehnt an die Fernsehgeschichte von Peter Hoff und Knut Hi- ckethier, die folgende Phasen beschrieben: eine Experimentierphase zwischen 1952 und 1961, eine Phase der Durchsetzung als Massenmedium zwischen dem Bau der Berliner Mauer und 1972, eine dritte Phase, die vom Machtantritt Erich Honeckers bis 1989 reichte und eine letzte Phase der Desintegration in das bundesdeutsche föderale Rundfunk- und Mediensystem. Obwohl das DFG- Projekt Programmgeschichte des DDR-Femsehens später eine weitere Differenzierung für unter- schiedliche Programmsegmente vornahm und Epochenklassifizierungen ausarbeitete, ermöglicht dieses evolutionäre Raster von Experiment, Etablierung, Diversifizierung und Auflösung einen Überblick über die Meilensteine in der Geschichte des ostdeutschen Fernsehens sowie die Elemen- te seiner politischen Kontrolle und die Entwicklung der Programmschemata. Im zweiten Teil geht der Text ausführlicher auf die fiktionalen Produktionen des DDR- Femsehens ein, benennt zentrale Wendepunkte in der Entwicklung der Fernsehdramatik und refe- riert Ergebnisse vor allem aus dem Forschungsschwerpunkt Literaturverfilmungen.____________ First, I would like to give some basic background information about East German Televi- sion: its history, its stars and its most famous programs. Second, I’d like to present some results of our research on the fictional productions of the Deutsche Fernsehfunk - televi- sion dramas, made-for-tv movies, and especially literary adaptations. For heuristic reasons, I’d like to divide East German television history into four peri- ods, following the structure that Peter Hoff and Knut Hickethier use in their History of German Television (Hickethier/ Hoff 1998): The first period, is dated from 1952 to roughly 1961. This was followed by a second period, which can be fixed between the rise of the Wall in 1961 and the coming to power of Erich Honecker in 1971. Hoff and Hick- ethier localize a third period beginning with Honecker in 1971, which lasted until the end of the GDR-Television as a state ruled institution of the GDR, that is until the end of the GDR itself. This is followed by a fourth and final period, in which the institution was involved in the integration into or rather disintegration (into) - the federal structures of the television system of “reunified” Germany as they exist today. Hence one can file the history of East German television in the following scheme:2 1 This text is based on a lecture I gave at the Fulbright Commission’s international seminary Visual Culture in Germany in Berlin 2004. 2 This scheme has been modified later several times during the work of the Research Project Programmgeschichte des DDR-Fernsehens - komparativ. For a more sophisticated model of GDR television history see Steinmetz/Viehoff 2008. 180 Henning Wrage 1952-1961 Television as experiment 1961-1972 Between building the Berlin Wall and Honecker 1972-1989 From “Range and Diversity” to the end of the state-ruled TV 1989-1992 Disintegration into the German federal broadcasting system fig. 1: epoch model of East German television history by Hickethier/Hoff 1998 Part I - The history of the “Deutscher Fernsehfunk”. The early years: 1952-1961 Following World War II, the Soviet occupying powers in the GDR showed a strong in- terest in re-establishing a working radio broadcasting system. As opposed to the western FRG, the eastern GDR broadcasting system was not based on a federal model, but on a centralist one. With the beginning of the Cold War, broadcasting in general, but espe- cially the radio was first of all an instrument of propaganda. In other words: until the early 1950s, the Cold War in the media was fought by the radio stations, and the devel- opment of television was not in the center of the political attention. So - plans to develop a Center for television Broadcasting did not begin in East Germany until 1949. First attempts at television broadcasting were (then) made in 1950, and the ‘unofficial test program’ for GDR television began in June 1952. Its ‘official test program’ was set and run on the 21st of December 1952, which just happened to be Josef Stalin’s 73rd Birth- day/ The first person ever to be broadcast live in GDR television was anchorwoman Mar- git Schaumäker. After her announcement, Hermann Zilles, the first general director of the GDR television introduced the company, at that time called the Fernsehzentrum (televi- sion-centre) Berlin Adlershof, and its program. This introduction was followed by the first news broadcast Aktuelle Kamera, which would remain GDR’s nightly news format until 1989. After Aktuelle Kamera, a short film called Fernsehen aus der Nähe betrachtet (Television Close-Up) was shown, the first film about television-making and so the first case of (media-)self-reference. On the first official day, there were also two more films: a short film congratulating Stalin and a documentary about the soviet city of Stalingrad. Since the production of TV-sets had just begun in the GDR in 1950, official estimates were that only around 70 sets were out there to receive this first program. Although it had been intended that individual households receive the program, up until 1955 there were only about 15.000 televisions registered in the entire GDR. The reason is simple: they 3 On a side note: after Stalin’s death and his postum proscription by Nikita Chrustschow, the official portrayals of GDR television were changed - suddenly, it was claimed that the official test program had begun on the 13th of December. Was it GDR 1952 or Orwells 1984? Hard to tell. A Hitchhikers guide to East German Television 181 were just too expensive. As a reaction to this, the government established so called Fern- sehkabinette, free public television rooms, which made a collective reception in a semi- cinematographic dispositive possible. In the 1950s, East German television was completely different from television as we know it today. There were no remote controls - no need for one either, when only one black-and-white channel broadcasts for just two hours a day (with the exception of mon- days) - two hours that you could see in a public place on a screen with a diagonal of seven inches (or approx. 18 centimetres). It didn’t take too long for television in the GDR to finally become a private affair, however: by 1960, the number of TV-sets in private homes exceeded one million and TV had become a mass medium. Returning to the mid-50ies: The Offizielles Versuchsprogramm (official test program) ended in 1956; the television broadcasting station changed its name