576 FRANK BÖSCH AND CHRISTOPH CLASSEN
Simultaneously, the West German cameras served as a shield against a
“Chinese solution” with a violent crackdown. In particular on 9 Novem-
ber, the West German news fueled the fl ames of the announcement of the
freedom to travel that pushed East Germans to the border, tearing down
the Wall earlier than had been planned.
As the Berlin Wall collapsed, a transformation also set in within the
East German media. In order to regain credibility, it began to report more
openly about protests and grievances within the country. On 4 November
1989, GDR television broadcasted live coverage of a four-hour demon-
stration at Alexanderplatz, and the number of viewers who tuned into
Aktuelle Kamera skyrocketed. Beginning at the end of October, programs
such as Prisma or Elf 99 also fostered the collapse of the SED with investi-
gative reports about scandals, such as the luxurious lives of the Politburo
members living in a forest community near Wandlitz.^98 The viewers of
these programs were intensely involved in this transformation of the me-
dia: some television discussions prompted almost fi fty thousand people
to call in,^99 and the larger daily newspapers received about six hundred
letters to the editor each day as part of a dialog about the reforms.^100
In addition, structural reforms were made after the Wall came down.
Beginning in mid-November, the SED newspapers dismissed their edi-
tors-in-chief, and the editorial boards promoted either the deputy editors
or section editors to these highest posts. The papers gradually loosened
themselves from the SED, and then later the PDS (Party of Democratic
Socialism), from January 1990 onward, which led them to seek partners
in the West to make up for the missing state subsidies. They sought to
build up the trust of the population by off ering the newly established
opposition parties space on their pages to introduce themselves. Like-
wise, the papers started to change their names to better relate to their
cities or regions: Freie Erde (Free Earth), for example, became Nordkurier
(Northern Courier), while Das Volk (The People) turned into Thüringer
Allgemeine (Thuringian General). This was symptomatic of the shifting
outlook in the East that focused strongly on the construction of regional
identities.
Since the early 1990s, West German publishing houses had tried to
gain a foothold in the East German media market. This was not something
specifi c to East Germany; rather, it was characteristic of all of Central Eu-
rope. It also corresponded with the general trend toward international-
ized media companies that had set in at the end of the 1980s in the West.
The WAZ Group, for example, had already acquired almost half of the
Austrian newspaper with the highest circulation, Neue Kronen Zeitung, in
1987, while Springer-Verlag became involved in Austria’s Standard news-
paper. After 1990, the governments in the postsocialist states sought to