The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been ...paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don't Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the
culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the
East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has
been ...paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events,
particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer
culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don't Need No
Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular
unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under
Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and
public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders
into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state
power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.
In concert with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, the East German government vigorously opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s and supported North Vietnam politically and ...economically. Concurrently, it sponsored ongoing solidarity campaigns in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) against the US-led coalition. As the American war effort deteriorated, the East German government reaped a significant boost both internationally and domestically as a result of these campaigns. This "Vietnam Bonus" helped to enhance the international stature of the GDR and increased the domestic stability of the SED government in the early 1970s.
The Vietnam War provided the East German government with a golden opportunity. No functionary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands SED) could have ...dreamed up a better script for the country’s Cold War propaganda. It had all of the ingredients and characters for a gripping and winning formula: an aggressive capitalist American intruder, who became all the more menacing as the war went on; the evil West German ally, who was as sisting the imperialist bully and became implicated in its destructive actions; a socialist Vietnamese underdog, who much of the world and your own population
EPILOGUE Horten, Gerd
Don't Need No Thought Control,
06/2020
Book Chapter
The reason the Berlin Wall fell so fast in 1989 was that it had been crumbling for so long. It crumbled for a number of reasons, which merged, intersected, and amplified each other in the 1970s and ...1980s. While this study focused on cultural and consumption-based dynamics in East Germany, it also demonstrates that these developments were intertwined with political, social, economic, technological, and international transformations and events. The lack of adequate resources deeply influenced every aspect of East Germany’s media and consumer culture. Especially as repeated economic crises threatened the very existence of the SED regime, its leadership was
In the socialist shorthand, “class struggle” referred to the international Cold War and the irreconcilable antagonism between peaceful communist countries representing the power of workers and ...farmers and the imperialist West, which was ruled by capitalist oligarchies intent on political dominance and military expansion. As the previous chapters have highlighted, this conflict was fought through numerous venues: through the proxy war and propaganda exploits in Vietnam, through international athletic competitions—particularly the Olympic Games—as well as through the fight over movie audiences and cinematic influence. While many of these areas were not directly political in nature, all of them
INTRODUCTION Horten, Gerd
Don't Need No Thought Control,
06/2020
Book Chapter
This book focuses on an intriguing paradox of East German society and the overall dynamics of the cultural Cold War. On the one hand, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was a totalitarian regime ...that attempted to impose a monopoly as well as strict control over its media and culture and frequently asserted these ambitions with brutal efficiency and a complete disregard for the resulting casualties. On the other hand, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the regime led by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands SED) condoned an ever-greater influx of especially Western popular and consumer culture
Since they were integral parts of East Germany’s media and culture, it is not surprising that popular music and radio broadcasting developed along similar lines as GDR cinema and television in the ...1970s and 1980s. There are indeed numerous parallels between all of these media in the last two decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall. All of them struggled mightily with the continuous tension—and ultimately irreconcilable conflict—between their political mandate to educate a new socialist personality and the entertainment demands of the vast majority of the East German audiences. Likewise, the GDR media generally fought reactive
The last fifty years have seen the further expansion of the role of media during times of war. Although no longer dominated by large-scale propaganda agencies as during the two world wars, the media ...nevertheless have become ever more integral to the planning and conduct of wars. This article applies the concept of mediatization in an attempt to capture the ever-increasing role of the media during war times as part of an ongoing and accelerating historical process. It uses a comparative analysis to highlight the commonalities of this process as well as to emphasize national particularities. The article argues that the mediatization of war has significantly accelerated over the past fifty years and has established the media as the "fourth branch" of military operations, just as essential as the army, navy, and air force.
