552 FRANK BÖSCH AND CHRISTOPH CLASSEN
the full supply of televisions in East German households established an
audiovisual link between the GDR and the FRG. The silent tolerance of
the presence of West German radio and television in the GDR, which
were now no longer blocked by jamming, abetted this media transfer.^3
Furthermore, media content in the GDR began to draw more heavily on
West German productions. It increased its trade in Western television
programs and fi lms while also boosting its own production of program-
ming that was modeled after Western entertainment formats. Likewise, a
new kind of journalistic exchange evolved after the GDR accredited West
German correspondents for the fi rst time in 1973 because it allowed for
regular reports from within East Germany to reach a Western audience.
However, the West German press was still banned in the GDR, and West
Germans ignored the East German papers. Nonetheless, the print me-
dia in the two countries still engaged in an ongoing dialog of response.
That said, it has to be borne in mind that most of these interactions were
strongly one-sided because there was very little media reception of con-
tent from the GDR in West Germany.
Although the media systems quite clearly diff ered in their political na-
tures, there were similarities in media use in both German states. Accord-
ing to surveys, a good two-thirds of East as well as West Germans named
watching television as their favorite leisure activity at the end of the
1960s, followed by reading the papers. The popularity of watching fi lms
in movie theaters, in contrast, sunk to an all-time low in both Germanys
in the 1960s.^4 Additionally, as in most other industrialized countries, the
proportion of entertainment within the media landscape grew on both
sides of the Wall. Both countries experienced a concentration of the press
market and increased media diff erentiation according to specifi c target
audiences, especially in terms of newspapers. Even in the GDR, where
the SED controlled and subsidized the media, it still became a consumer
good, and it became impossible for the party to ignore its citizens’ desire
for entertainment. After 1990, the East German media landscape in par-
ticular underwent a radical transformation in which it adopted Western
structures.
Scholars still disagree about how to assess the media in the GDR, as
well as the media communication between the two Germanys. For a long
time, the GDR media was simply seen as part of a uniform and centrally
controlled propaganda apparatus that ignored the desires of the popula-
tion in order to follow the dictates of the SED in the boring style so char-
acteristic of the party. Correspondingly, scholarship focused primarily on
the way the SED controlled the media.^5 Rather than attributing a powerful
infl uence to this propaganda as was done for other dictatorships, and
especially National Socialism, scholars stressed the lacking infl uence of