Ff:Ffi-W"-T Ffi Potterns Neglect: Rituols of Reception, Of
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A FIIM QUARTERTY OF I}IEORY CRITICISM AND PRACTICE $6.m voL It, No. I .T.:ff:ffi-W"-t ffi potterns Neglect: Rituols of Reception, of ond its Postwor RePresentqtion By Williom Uricchio its lntroduction corFx)ratc compctition, the government extended 'coordinating' function, evident in new politico-eco- nomic formrrlati()ns of socially sanitized monopoly On March 22nd,1935, Reichssendeleiter Eugen capitalist pnrduction, such as the Volkswagen and iladamovskY declared, Volkst'mfacngcr, to tclevision and in so doing, mapped thc r()utc to prosprcrity for the mapr electronics conc€rns. Today National Socialist broadcasting, working logethn with the Reich Post and German industry, begins as the first The clcctronics industry fully expected purchases of broadcasting system in the world with regular teleaision homc televisic;n receivers to parallel the levels already programming. Orc of man's boldest dreams has bezn expcricnccrd by radio. 1n1937, Germans held over 8 ralizzd. " .1 million radios-by far the heaviest concentration on the this was merely the mid-point of a But other nations were still dreaming- RCA's annual Contincnt----and "a radio in every Cerman house."3 report of the same year called regular public transmis- campaign to place 200 home television sets had been sold. sions "impractical," and despite early technological Yet by 1939, only leads, public American broadcasting was delayed until intensive research, product development and 1939 (and even then on an experimental license). British Despite failure to efforts were not so tardy, beginning in 19%, but lasting state cultivation of television, broadcasting's complex and only until the war's start in 1939.2 attract a significant public reveals a overdetermined moment in the relation of technology, industry and politics. The multinational dimensions of Yet the Cermans, sharing Patents with England's Baird the context International Television Company and the Radio this moment and its implications both within develop- Corporation of America, caPitalized uPon an early start of national conflict and supravening economic of the history and continued broadcasting and expanding transmission ment, complicate received views period's services throughout the war. When their transmission and suggest new persPectives. towers were bombed in1943, they simply switched over between to thc cable system that had been in development since The paradoxes pervading the German situation for, 1936. And when the towers were spared, as was the case 1935 and 19214 extend to, and perhaps help account of with the Eiffel Tower, the Cermans continued to broad- the peculiar nature of postwar characterizations Socialist epoch. Anglo- cast until military collapse. television in the National American historians have tended simply to ignore itself, By pointing to the shared mission of government and Cerman television, and until recently in Germany national industry, Hadamovsky's address accurately with a few notable excePtions, the television of the 1950s Given the located the dynamic which propelled Cerman broadcast- and 1950s has dominated historical efforts.a with ing into the forefront of international activity. While popular interest in National Socialism, together history, the some very real benefits emerged from this conjunction, it recent scholarly attention to broadcast in this also resulted in fundamental contradictions particularly marginalization of Germany's developments explana- for the German electronics industry. period appears surprising. While a variety of tory factors will be addressed in the following Pages, one the histori- Rapid advances in cabie technology, in the live transmis- factor looms large because of its relevance to sion of images (used in the 1935 Olympics), and in ographic contours and tendencies of the film/television studies discipline. Virtually no intact television pro- receiver technology, wer€ Promoted and heavily marketed in the annual public broadcast exhibitions to grams remain from the period under study.s Conse- of reading both domestic and foreign markets. Each of the mairr quently, textual analysis and the extrapolation to a reception electronics companies developed a wide variety of home positions with possible access theorized of and histori- reccivers and displayed them with appropriate hype to a base lay largely outside the realm critical kinds of questions 49 market ready for the future. Despite initial inter- cal encounters with the pcriod. The ml suSgests implications and our This momcnt in broadcast history raised about early Gcrman tclcvision' of the that can be which revcrberatc not only through the particulars to it, must of nccessity depcnd evidence-based access a;;r" situation, but through the larger pattern of the rich institutional and tcchnological discoursc ,po" tt intcrnational industriaiization of communications' " it. of surrounding i'r.,i.rto.ty given Cermany's early institutionalization coi,munications tcchnologies' its,development texts obrriously complicatc-r any The absence of television "-"rgingr..,rii.u u, altcrnativc or counterPoint to the evolution to anaiyz-e German television as an historical distribution ;;;;pi wc Int,,.gunirution of tclcvision's production' Yet evcn lacking tcxtual.cvidcncc' and .n"alJ ,y.t"*- ur,i as cxpcricnccd in the United States some headway by explonng thc rclationships anlnderly- -u, nuin S.iarin."xiiui,ion Thc Ccrman situation foregrounds industry and politics at a particular develop- ;;;,:;*h"ology, ins continuitY of tcchnological and industrial wittiur''t, urging a conccption of ;;;;"i. R"y-Ina *lnt in thc rolc piaycd by multinational that moves beyond that of merc trans- communicati'on "rid"ni Thus, d espitc the st ructural: as both ..r1r.rtu,-rt lT,tl:t]crt"' mission apParatus, stressed its imP()rtancc and organizational produced bYand as anuansof divergences aPPearlng 'produclion within a broader amonB American, British social framcwork'6 The and German systems, all kinds of evidence we have share a rclatcd set of cco- available with Cerman nomic and tcchnological television, the exPiicitness of assumptions- And all are its homologies with other further comPlicated bY mcdia sYstcms and the tangi- patterns of license bility of its relations with the sharing agreements and more general Productive inter-corPorate and forccs of monoPolY caPital- international investment' of ism even in a Period From this PersPective, national conflict, mark it as a the marginalized status sitc of contradictions around of Cerman develoPments Williams' concerns broad discrepan- which in broadcast history, together with the foregrounded' are them- appear cies in its characteiiz-ation when discussed' interest' postwar sclves of historiographic Finally, the issue of early German tcicvision's marginalization *q"'f: ,ffi"ntution and configuration of German television' then' Some of these^tl9:ificance rssues The cultural -particular as part of a broader set of issucs' historical development' as division and entails a look at a as structural concerns (e'g' archival of its representa- roi*. well as an examination of the contours others as interpretative (e'g' ideologically ;:G;, and both within the pcriod and into our Present' of tire nature of Cerman.fascism tion inscribed formulations "textless" in a traditional sensc' the many to post-war socro- Rttlrorgt and particularly its relationship Cerman telcvision's national emcr- .on,.ua"ictions pervad ing forces). Still other issucs rclatc to thc with the and multinational developmcnt together ".ont*i. and function of nationalizcd dis- a.*i"ation of its historical trcatment' suggest its relevance """.n. of intcrnational pcrspcc- oatterns :o;.;, often to the exclusion I;;;;i, i"-t, allowing us to problematize-aspects of medium so pervasively multi-national in twes, in a television's broader cultu ral config'uration'' i".tr"of"gy and development' But tn 1ny,t""ltn1,^,,..- contoursof German television,s hi storica l rCPrCSCntatlon and idcological reflect back uPon our cultural prciudices contradictions in a revealing manner' 50 B*Ewreffitpq?.4flffiF' "One of Mans'Boldest Dreams. .,,: The nr,r n( I.rt ('(l tr,lt.vision,s Problematic technical standardization. But the Intersection of Technology, l)r.P;r11;111,1.1 In du stry Minrstry, with its much closer affiliation and Politics thr'NSI)AI), to asscrted a distinct developmcnt olan sr1;g.sting autlicncc homologies ,on."*hut cioser to film As notcd, the German electronics (t'crr industry, cxtrapolating t ra I i zccl, publi c screen ing) than rad io (decentralized, {rom its experience with radio, had cvcry'rcason privaro listcning). to Thc propagand_a theory then in vogue, bcliovc that it would expericncc massrvc strongly tclcvision rrlcs. supportcd by Hadamovsky lGermanr/s Although it became incrcasinglv clcar that Ccrmany,s D-irtr:tor of Broadcastingl and Coebt"tr, faro.fu- tn" industry-wide standardizatioii would effcctivcncss limit profit of group rcccption. And so initially, margins-and the competitivc to the distribution of capital, most of thc corporate community, public Iargc industrics 9,:TrV television had already cxpcricnccd thc benefits halls seating between 40 of and 400 p""pt" emergla as the state rcgulation and consequcnt rcduction of inter_ primary rcccption forum (an uppiou.f, not diiimilar corporate competition during thc First World War. from that uscd in the Sovict Uni,on at the time). Moreover, at least within thc clcctronics ind ustry, The development stock ownership patterns of this conflicting strategy_ and