Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: How could the communist party in the German Democratic Republic stay in power without many incidents over 40 years?Where did the protest movement come from, that destroyed this solid system almost in a blink of an eye?The answer of the present study leads to the steering of the mass media, which was in fact a trial to control the public sphere at all.The political staged public sphere did not provide an intermediary system for debate that would have allowed for bilateral exchange between politics and society and given free access to everyone.Yet, even in the GDR there was a domain that was not secret and that related to State affairs.On the basis both of the Arena Model by Gerhards and Neidhardt (1990) and the findings of historical research about the GDR, the paper differentiates the public sphere in socialist countries.Alongside the two sub-levels of mass communication in socialist countries (the politically staged public sphere and the media from the West), official and unofficial events and meetings as well as encounters there was a fourth level: internal public spheres like readers' letters or party meetings which were open to GDR citizens only.The study is based on four main sources: files from the Federal archives in Berlin, a content analyses of the daily instructions given by the media headquarter of the communist party, (quantitative and qualitative) content analyses of four main GDR newspapers, and a series of about 100 biographical interviews with former GDR residents.
Author: Michael Meyen
Language: German
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2319635594