The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [39]
East Germans were not all that interested in tracking the latest news from NATO. Instead, they preferred soft news and entertainment, particularly American TV series. Such shows as Dallas, Miami Vice, Bonanza , Sesame Street, and The Streets of San Francisco were particularly popular; even the leading Communist Party journal Einheit acknowledged that Dynasty—known in Germany as The Denver Clan and the most popular of the lot—was widely watched. Paul Gleye, an American Fulbright scholar who lived and taught in GDR between 1988 and 1989, remembers that whenever he brought out his map of the United States to tell East Germans about his country, “the first question often was ‘Well, show me where Dallas and Denver are,’” while his students “seemed to be more interested in hearing about Montana State University when I told them it was about 850 kilometers northwest of Denver than when I described its setting in a picturesque Alpine valley in the Rocky Mountains.”
Long after the Berlin Wall fell, Michael Meyen and Ute Nawratil, two German academics, conducted extensive interviews with hundreds of East Germans. They found that many of them did not even believe what they heard on the Western news. They thought that the portrayal of life in East Germany was predictably uninformed and highly ideological, while the extensive propaganda of their own government made them expect that Western news, too, was heavily shaped by the government. (Ironically, in their distrust and suspicion of the Western propaganda apparatus, they were more Chomskian than Noam Chomsky himself). When, in a separate study, East Germans were asked what changes they would like to see in their country’s television programming, they voted for more entertainment and less politics. Eventually GDR’s propaganda officials learned that the best way to have at least a modicum of people watch their ideological programming on GDR’s own television was to schedule it when West German television was running news and current affairs programs—which East Germans found to be the least interesting.
The Opium of the Masses: Made in GDR
That the never-ending supply of Western entertainment made large parts of GDR’s population useless as far as activism was concerned was not lost on German dissidents. As Christopher Hein, a prominent East German writer and dissident, stated in a 1990 interview:
[In the GDR we had a difficult task because] the whole people could leave the country and move to the West as a man every day at 8 PM—via television. That lifted the pressure. Here is the difference between Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. There the pressure continued to bear down and generated counter-pressure.... That’s why I always envied the Russians and the Poles.... In general, the helpful proximity of the Federal Republic was not helpful to our own development.... Here we had no samizdat, as long as we had access to the publishing houses of West Germany.
Subsequent research based on archival data proved Hein right. East German authorities, preoccupied with their own survival, spent a lot of resources on understanding the attitudes of their young citizens. To that effect, they commissioned a number of regular studies, most of which were conducted by the ominous-sounding Central Institute for Youth Research founded in 1966. Between 1966 and 1990 it conducted several hundred surveys that studied the attitudes of high school and college students, young workers, and others; the staff of the institute could not study other demographic groups, nor could they publish their results—those were classified. The reports were declassified after German unification and have opened up a bounty of research for academics studying life in East Germany. The surveys polled respondents about regime support (e.g., asking them whether they agreed with statements like “I am convinced of the Leninist/Marxist worldview” and “I feel closely attached to East Germany”).
Holger Lutz Kern and Jens Hainmueller, two German academics