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Staging West German Democracy examines how political “founding discourses” of the nascent Federal Republic (FRG) were reflected, reinforced, and actively manufactured by the Federal government in conjunction with the West German, state-controlled newsreel system, the Deutsche Wochenschau. By looking at the institutional history of the Deutsche Wochenschau and its close relationship to the Federal Press Office, Jan Uelzmann traces the Adenauer administration's project of maintaining a “government channel” in an increasingly diverse, de-centralized, and democratic West German media landscape. Staging West German Democracy reconstructs the company's integral role in the planning, production, and dissemination of pro-government PR, and through detailed analyses reveals the films to celebrate the FRG as an economically successful and internationally connected democracy under Adenauer's leadership. Apart from providing election propaganda for Adenauer's CDU party, these films provided an important stabilizing factor for the FRG's project of explaining and promoting democracy to its citizens, and of defining its public image against the backdrops of the Third Reich past and a competing, contemporary incarnation of German nationhood, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In this regard, Staging West German Democracy adds in important ways to our understanding of the media's role in the West German nation building process.
How postwar West German democracy was styled through word, image, sound, performance, and gathering
This book offers a view of West German social structure and political culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Focusing on the remarkable changes that have taken place in West Germany since World War II, it provides a basis for judging what direction a united Germany is likely to take.
"In 1970, the Red Army Faction declared war on West Germany. The militants failed to bring down the state, but this book argues that the decade-long debate they inspired helped shape a new era. After 1945, West Germans answered long-standing doubts about democracy's viability and fears of authoritarian state power with a 'militant democracy' empowered against its enemies and a popular commitment to anti-fascist resistance. In the 1970s, these postwar solutions brought Germans into open conflict, fighting to protect democracy from both terrorism and state overreaction. Drawing on diverse sources, Karrin Hanshew shows how Germans, faced with a state of emergency and haunted by their own history, managed to learn from the past and defuse this adversarial dynamic. This negotiation of terror helped them to accept the Federal Republic of Germany as a stable, reformable polity and to reconceive of democracy's defence as part of everyday politics"--
During the Cold War, scientific discoveries were adapted and critiqued in many different forms of media across a divided Europe. Now, more than 30 years since the end of the Cold War, Science on Screen and Paper explores the intersections between scientific research and media by drawing from media history, film studies, and the history of science. From public relations material to educational and science films, from children’s magazines to television broadcasts, the contributions in this collected volume seek to embrace medial differences and focus on intersectional themes and strategies for the representation of science.
Scholars of democracy long looked to the Federal Republic of Germany as a notable “success story,” a model for how to transition from a violent, authoritarian regime to a peaceable nation of rights. Although this account has been contested since its inception, the narrative has proved resilient—and it is no surprise that the current moment of crisis that Western democracies are experiencing has provoked new interest in how democracies come to be. The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany casts a fresh look at the early years of this fledgling democracy and draws attention to the broad range of ways democracy and the democratic subject were conceived and rendered at this time. These essays highlight the contradictory and competing impulses that ran through the project to democratize postwar society and cast a critical eye toward the internal biases that shaped the model of Western democracy. In so doing, the contributions probe critical questions that we continue to grapple with today. How did postwar thinkers understand what it meant to be democratic? Did they conceive of democratic subjectivity in terms of acts of participation, a set of beliefs or principles, or perhaps in terms of particular feelings or emotions? How did the work to define democracy and its subjects deploy notions of nation, race, and gender or sexuality? As this book demonstrates, the case of West Germany offers compelling ways to think more broadly about the emergence of democracy. The Arts of Democratization offers lessons that resonate with the current moment as we consider what interventions may be necessary to resuscitate democracy today.
The Federal Republic of Germany has long been held up as a 'model society' on account of its economic and social policy achievements. Largely ignored, however, has been the crucial part played by extra-parliamentary protest in the maturing of democracy in that society. In this, the first comprehensive study of the subject in English, the authors trace the rich history of political protest in West Germany and examine the political role of critical intellectuals. The book will give the reader a good understanding of the crucial changes that have taken place in the political culture of the Federal Republic since the mid 1960s.