560 FRANK BÖSCH AND CHRISTOPH CLASSEN
pers that sold a total of about 1.6 million copies, and the number of titles
had doubled by the end of the 1980s.^34 In a certain sense, this came to
resemble the formation of a social-moral milieu akin to what had taken
place among the Social Democrats and the Catholics in the early Kaiser-
reich. Special bookstores, bars, and shops catered to these groups, as
did new press outlets that created communication networks within their
respective milieus. The emergence of these alternative newspapers cor-
responded to the growing signifi cance attached to local politics. These
papers diff ered fundamentally from the mainstream West German press
at fi rst, and they were defi nitely diff erent than those in the GDR. Most of
them were organized in a grassroots democratic way, and those involved
either volunteered their time or were paid meager salaries. These papers
did not really have any commercial aspirations because their goal was
to promote the spread of “authentic” reports and to discuss issues from
the world of their readers.^35 Accordingly, most of these papers only had
a circulation of a few thousand. Nevertheless, the alternative city maga-
zines in the major cities soon achieved fi ve-fi gure readership numbers,
such as tip and Zitty in Berlin, Pfl asterstrand in Frankfurt, and Oxmox in
Hamburg.^36 As it quickly became apparent, the readers of these papers
were usually less interested in the political content than they were in the
information about local events. Combined with the commercialized city
magazines, however, the alternative press still reached a circulation of
over seven million copies.
Meanwhile, in socialist Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, an un-
derground press without state licenses also fl ourished in the 1970s. It
was largely responsible for the dissemination of alternative viewpoints
throughout the country.^37 Referred to as samizdat publications, these pa-
pers reached millions of readers as part of the Solidarność (Solidarity)
movement. In the GDR, however, the oppositional press was not nearly as
prominent as the samizdat in Poland. Over the course of the 1980s, at least
a few alternative papers appeared that dealt with peace, human rights, or
environmental issues, but only a few hundred copies were printed of each
edition. The few smaller oppositional papers often appeared under the
aegis of the church, such as the Umweltblätter from the Zionskirche. The
only widely distributed press that remained independent from the SED
was that of the church. The church had over thirty-four diff erent papers,
with a circulation of about four hundred thousand copies, but it mostly
had to refrain from addressing political issues.^38 The small circulation of
the oppositional papers in the GDR stemmed in part from the tight sur-
veillance of the Stasi. The spirit of resistance also seemed to be stronger
in Poland, which meant that more people wrote and read these kinds of
publications. Moreover, the West German media provided a fl ow of infor-