554 FRANK BÖSCH AND CHRISTOPH CLASSEN
central directives. As head of state, Erich Honecker often signed off on
the content that was to appear in Neues Deutschland before publication
or on the main television news show, the Aktuelle Kamera, before it was
broadcasted. In West Germany, in contrast, even just attempts by poli-
ticians to control the media could easily turn into full-fl edged scandals.
Press reports often relied on the major news agency, the dpa, but it was
fi nanced by the media companies themselves and subject to competition
from other agencies.
The journalist profession also diff ered markedly between the two coun-
tries, even in terms of the education and training required. In the Federal
Republic, there was no formal vocational training paths for journalists,
nor was journalism ever a separate university major. In the GDR, how-
ever, anyone who wanted to go into journalism was basically required
to earn a degree from the School of Journalism in Leipzig or from the
journalism department at the university there.^10 This meant, of course,
that aspiring journalists were preselected on the basis of their ideologi-
cal commitment, and they underwent a further process of indoctrination.
Likewise, the image of the profession in West Germany—at least in the
last thirty years of the twentieth century–was primarily investigative in
nature, whereas it was seen as a particularly partisan profession in the
East that was committed to strengthening socialism. Accordingly, about
85 percent of the journalists in 1975 belonged to the SED and still others
were members of the bloc parties; on the eve of the GDR’s collapse, about
90 percent of them belonged to the association of professional journalists
in the GDR (the VDJ).^11 A systematic analysis of the number of unoffi cial
employees (Inoffi zielle Mitarbeiter, or IM) of the secret police—the Stasi—
involved in journalism is still lacking. However, case studies related to
individual papers have shown that there was probably a high percentage
of IMs employed by the papers. Despite the close alignment of the print
media with the SED, journalists had an ear to the ground in their conver-
sations with the general population that could be useful for the security
apparatus. In 1987, for example, ten of the fourteen local chief editors of
the regional daily Freie Erde were active IMs.^12
These kinds of diff erences were indeed manifold in divided Germany,
creating a rather static contrasting image between East and West. Yet it
is still very worthwhile to trace some of the similar, overarching develop-
ments that took place in both countries. For example, further explana-
tion is needed to account for the striking fact that newspaper circulation
spiked in the 1960s and 1970s in the GDR and the FRG, despite the fact
that many had expected the popularity of the press to decline in the face
of mounting competition coming from television. In the West, the num-
ber of papers sold daily climbed from about 15 million to over 20 million,