Atomic Express

 

 

 

Remember the Cold War joke, “In USSR, you don’t watch TV: it watches YOU!” ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

We take TV for granted. To quote from “Fight Club”’s Tyler Durden going on about how we have 500 channels but nothing to watch.

But what happens when you have only ONE channel to watch?

In ze DDR, there COULD be only one. DFF (that’s Deutsche Ferbsehfunk to the rest of us) was set up to compete with the West German TV Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, which started broadcasting in 1950. Of         course, the Iron Curtain was unable to seriously block radio and TV transmissions though they had jammers. Jammers would of course negatively effect their own agitprop, so they were not used.

Now, the use of television by a totalitarian German government was not a phenomenon. Nazi Germany was the first country to offer regular television programming, as it were (Do you want to know more? Go here and watch Michael Kloft’s “Television Under the Swastika” on the fine Smashing Telly site) from 1935 to 1945.

Indeed, the only reason we HAVE access to this early not to mention extremely creepy Nazi TV footage is because the East Germans unearthed and stored it.

I first became curious about East German TV when I was visiting the former East Germany in 1992. A friend of mine told me about this weird East German sitcom whereby two pilots from Interflug, the DDR airline, flew to places like Cuba, Angola and North Vietnam making jokes. It was this strange inversion of the world from the Communist perspective that became inadvertantly hilarious to the West German audience.

I read Anna Funder’s excellent book “Stasiland” back in 2003 (before YouTube took off). In it she tracked down and confronted former Vopo killers and incredibly banal security officials. In her travels in the former DDR she uncovers the film and TV archive in an effort to find Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the host of the propaganda show, “Die Schwarze Canal.” “The Black Channel” was East Germany’s answer to the West German show, “Die Rote Optik,” or “The Red View.” Black Channels in Europe are sewers, incidentally. The Black Channel was a bizarre inversion of Western reality where everything that we viewed as good was twisted into something bad and vice-versa by its host.

 

Von Schnitzler was to sort of banally evil person who could justify the murder of Germans trying to cross over the wall to West Berlin on his show, or as Anna Funder points out in the book, she wanted to find out “how this man turned inhumanity into humanity, these deaths into symbols of salvation.” It must have truly been an exercise in Orwellian mental gymnastics. On his last broadcast in 1989 as everyone was partying at Brandenberger Tor, Dirty Eddie declared that “The class struggle goes on!”  Like Hitler in the bunker moving armies that no longer existed on a map that was no longer relevent.

 

Not surprisingly, the DDR did not examine the Holocaust at all in its media, so there was no DDR version of  “Holocaust”  or “Judgement at Nuremberg.” On the other hand, West Germaners had Holocaust guilt force-fed to them as part of de-Nazification. Think of the long-range impact of that on East Germans….from one totalitairianism to another in no easy steps (see Mark Wolfgram’s interesting “The Holocaust through the Prism of East German Television” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies Vol. 20 No 1). So when “Die Schwartze Canal” went on and on about how the Federal Republic was full of Nazis, it was really a case of “Pot, meet Kettle.”

I found this on the net.

It was written by Charlotte Schawe, an architect from the DDR:

“For me, the worst thing about living in East Germany was that I could not leave the country. Our travel was restricted to visiting only East Bloc countries. I did not want to live in the West, but I did want to see these countries. We lived under such a tremendous burden because we thought freedom would never come to East Germany.

East Germany was a police state which controlled our daily lives. This was especially true in our schools and in our offices, where every third person would more than likely be an informant for the Stasi, the secret police. In my profession, out of a group of eight architects three or four could easily be police informants. Words cannot express the anger and sadness over knowing your best friend could be a police informant. One was always afraid and this fear extended to every aspect of a person’s life. Only afterwards were we able to read reports about the Stasi and how they controlled people everywhere in East Germany, from the cities down to the village level.

The secret police would harass citizens and use information against them as blackmail or as an enticement to cooperate. I know, for instance, of one friend of mine who had a boyfriend in West Germany. It was not allowed for East Germans to contact people in West Germany, but everyone did. The police wanted to know something about this man, but my friend refused to answer. The secret police knew that she was raising two children on her own, so they told her: “If you help us we can give you money.” She did not cooperate with them and nothing happened. She was lucky. So many East Germans lost their jobs, careers, or everything for refusing to collaborate with the Stasi.”

So how did the DDR handle crime dramas on DFF? “Polizeiruf 110” was a popular show. But what constituted ‘crime’ in the DDR? Regina Rauxloh gets into this in an article in the “German Law Journal”, and allow me to quote for effect,

“Existing crime was explained as a remnant from the old bourgeois society that would disappear as soon as Socialism was thoroughly established. In television police drama this historic explanation of crime was reflected by the programme ‘Fernsehpitaval’, which presented trials from the Kaiser Reich and the Weimar Republic. When in the Sixties crime had still not disappeared the explanations turned westwards. Crime was now believed to be initiated or at least influenced by the imperialistic West, particularly West Germany. The new police drama ‘Blaulicht’ dealt with cross border crime in Berlin and presented West Berlin criminals operating in the East sector (and being detected by the Eastern police, while the West Berlin law enforcers turned out to be quite useless). But after the construction of the Berlin Wall, when crime still continued to be committed, this explanation lost its credibility and Blaulicht ran out of stories.

The new criminological theory was based on a distinction between political and non-political crime, what Markovits calls ‘friend-enemy-theory’. According to this division the offender was either an ‘enemy of the state’ who deliberately tried to damage society (political crime), or they committed the crime not understanding that in the benevolent socialist society there was no need nor advantage in crime and that they would harm themselves most of all. This kind of offender was seen as the ‘mistaken friend’. Whereas the former one would be punished harshly and locked away, the latter had to be educated and then re-integrated in society. Law and particularly criminal law was a tool for the development of society towards a better community, i.e. communist society. Thus, in socialist countries law had an important educational role to play building and strengthening the citizens’ socialist conscience. The new police drama Polizeiruf 110 still stressed that crime was foreign to the nature of socialism, but it acknowledged that there were still unsolved conflict and thus crime in the GDR. However, it was clearly shown that crime could be overcome.

The aim to put the ‘enemy’, i.e. the political criminal, out of sight of the people was not only achieved by separating his or her prosecution and conviction from the ordinary criminal procedure7 but as well by excluding him or her from any coverage in the media. Subsequently, Polizeiruf 110 dealt only with the second form, the ‘mistaken friend’ who committed only non-political crime.

Since crime in a socialist society was bound to die out, it was presented much more harmless and less violent in Polizeiruf 110 than in its West German counterpart, Tatort. Instead of only homicides, the team in East Germany had also to deal with break-ins, alcohol abuse, embezzlement, fraud, and forgery. Interestingly for the viewer today, there were also crimes that are not labelled as such in West Germany, such as skiving off work, hooliganism or neglecting one’s children. Environmental crime or crime at higher social and political levels (such as tax evasion or other white-collar crime) was a taboo, and of course corruption or even attempt of corruption was never shown on screen.”

 

Hoolinganism?  

 

Here are some YouTube clips from the former Ost Germania for your viewing pleasure, if you can handle it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZrYQBg2iEo

Wake up in the Socialist Paradise!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP55a2EzE_c

Jazz and East German cars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOUA6aDprko&feature=related

We in the West are bugs to be eradicated:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFCosw69jjA&feature=related

But I thought everything was free in the Socialist Paradise!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfnODbvpwDY&feature=related

The East German Elmer Fudd:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM9l7OXd7T8&feature=related

Pssst! Wanna buy a Trabant? And.. DDR BIKERS???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuYFWcCWjyE&feature=related

Then there was DDR Disco….

http://www.vunet.org/videos/video_east_german_tv_disco_music_ddr-239.html

Oh and I can’t resist. Really I found an article on an 1985 East German video game: “Poly Play.” Hmmm…..sounds like it’s made for the swinging set but it’s really a Communist Pac-Man. Luckily the regieme didn’t continue or we would have Vopo-Mann gunning down class enemies on the Berlin Death Strip for prestige points.