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By Root 1824 0

teaching in the United States, studied this data to understand how the relationship between life satisfaction and regime support varied according to the availability of Western broadcasting. They published their findings in a provocatively titled paper, “Opium for the Masses: How Foreign Media Can Stabilize Authoritarian Regimes.” They found that those East German youth who could receive Western television were, overall, more satisfied and content with the regime; the ones who could not receive Western television—those living in the Valley of the Clueless—were much more politicized, more critical of the regime, and, most interestingly, more likely to apply for exit visas. Thus, they wrote, “in an ironic twist for Marxism, capitalist television seems to have performed the same narcotizing function in communist East Germany that Karl Marx had attributed to religious beliefs in capitalism societies when he condemned religion as ‘opium of the people.’”

They described this process as “escapism”: “West German Television allowed East Germans to vicariously escape life under communism at least for a couple of hours each night, making their lives more bearable and the East German regime more tolerable.... West German television exposure resulted in a net increase in regime support.” If anything, access to excellent entertainment from the West—it took GDR authorities many years to start producing high-quality entertainment programs that could rival those from abroad—depoliticized vast swathes of the East German population, even as it nominally allowed them to learn more about the injustices of their own regime from Western news programs. Western television made life in East Germany more bearable, and by doing so it may have undermined the struggle of the dissident movement. Most interestingly, it was in the Valley of the Clueless that protests began brewing; its residents were clearly more dissatisfied with life in the country than those who found a refuge in the exciting world of The Denver Clan.

If we judge by the youth survey data, we might conclude that young people were particularly susceptible to escapism; moreover, we don’t have much data for East German adults. The “liberation by gadgets” theory may thus have some validity. Perhaps, the adults, disappointed by the never-arriving “socialism with a human face,” were much more susceptible to despair and thus easier to politicize with teasing pictures of Western capitalism. Paul Betts, a British academic who has studied consumer culture in GDR, points out that “those things that the state had supposedly overcome in the name of the great socialist experiment—subjective fancy, individual luxury, commodity fetishism, and irrational consumer desire—eventually returned as its arch nemeses. The irony is that the people apparently took these dreams of a better and more prosperous world more seriously than the state ever expected, so much so that the government was ultimately sued for false advertising.” Or, as a popular joke of that period had it: “Marxism would have worked if it wasn’t for cars.” (It seems that the Chinese have learned the East German lesson, purchasing the entire Volvo operation from Ford in 2010.)

The East German experience shows that the media could play a much more complex and ambiguous role under authoritarianism than many in the West initially assumed. Much of the early scholarship on the subject greatly underestimated the need for entertainment and overestimated the need for information, especially of the political variety. Whatever external pressures, most people eventually find a way to accustom themselves to the most brutal political realities, whether by means of television, art, or sex.

Furthermore, the fact that the media did such a superb job at covering the fall of the Berlin Wall may have influenced many observers to believe that it played a similarly benevolent role throughout the entire history of the Cold War. But this was just a utopian dream: Whatever noble roles media take on during extraordinary crisis situations should not be generalized,