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By Root 1707 0

to expect that of all the other communist states GDR would have the most politically informed citizens, the most vibrant political opposition, and civil society groups as well as a burgeoning samizdat enterprise. These expectations would be in line with how the impact of information was viewed during the Cold War. It was all too easy to fall under the impression that all media consumption was political, because researchers had two limited sources for their assertions: recent émigrés and those who wrote admiring letters to the likes of Radio Free Europe. Such sources bolstered the view that consuming official narratives of events in state-run media led to apathy and disillusionment, pushing people to seek solace in foreign radio programs. Yet neither of the two groups were unbiased, and the conclusions of such studies have been repeatedly challenged. Concluding that people who wrote letters to Radio Free Europe were representative of the population at large was like walking into a bar a few blocks from Congress, interviewing a few congressional staffers deeply mesmerized by a C-SPAN broadcast on the bar’s wall, and lauding the fact that most Americans are superbly informed about the nuts and bolts of national politics. (That said, not all researchers doing such quasi-detective work were dilettantes; to access the actual views of the people they interviewed and whose letters they read, they paid particular attention to Freudian slips and typos.)

Eventually there emerged a far better, more empirical way to test common Western assumptions about the role of media in authoritarian regimes. It was a stroke of luck: East Germany’s geography made it difficult to block Western signals on most of its territory, and only one-sixth of the population, concentrated mostly in counties that were far from the western border, could not receive West German television (this area was widely known—and ridiculed—as Tal Der Ahnungslosen, “The Valley of the Clueless”). In 1961—the year the Berlin Wall went up—the country’s leading youth organization, Freie Deutsche Jugend, began dispatching their youthful troops to many a rooftop to find antennae aimed at the West and either dismantle them or reorient them toward East German transmission towers. Popular anger, however, quickly drove the youngsters away, and such raids stopped. By 1973 GDR’s leader, Erich Honecker, acknowledging that West German television was already widely popular, gave up and allowed all GDR’s citizens—except soldiers, police, and teachers—to watch whatever they wanted, on the condition the citizens would closely scrutinize everything they saw and heard in the Western media. At the same time, Honecker urged GDR’s own television to “overcome a certain type of tedium” and “to take the desire for good entertainment into account.” Thus, for nearly three decades, most of GDR’s citizens were in a rather peculiar situation: They could, in theory, compare how the two German regimes—one democratic and one communist—chose to portray the same events. If the conclusions of all those studies that analyzed letters sent to Radio Free Europe were right, one could expect that East Germans would be glued to news programs from the democratic West, learning of the abuses of their own regime and searching for secret antigovernment cells to join.

It’s hard to say whether East Germans did practice as much media criticism as Western scholars would have subsequently wanted them to, but it seems that Western television only made them more complacent—a fact that GDR’s ruling elites eventually recognized. When they insisted on removing a satellite dish that was illegally installed by the residents of the small German town of Weissenberg, the local communist officials and the mayor were quick to point out that members of their community were “‘much more content’ since the introduction of West German television,” that their attitudes toward the East German regime had become “more positive,” and that all applications for exit visas (that is, to immigrate to the West) had been withdrawn. From the early 1980s