MASS MEDIA IN DIVIDED GERMANY 579
able to turn it into a real national paper for the capital, and even today it is
still most successful in East Berlin. The journalistic gap was particularly
prominent in Berlin. BILD, for example, began printing two additions,
one for Berlin-West and one for Berlin-East/Brandenburg, both of which
catered to the diff erent views and demands of their respective readers
in the years that followed.^106 Even fi nancial papers such as Capital and
Wirtschaftswoche produced separate editions for the East. Among the
newly established publications, it was primarily the city magazines that
survived thanks to the upswing in regional identity formation.
Not only the media landscape and media content, but also the use of
media diff ered between East and West in the 1990s and diff ers even still
today. News magazines such as Der Spiegel hardly sold in the East, and
the same held true for upper-middle-class lifestyle magazines such as
Geo or Cosmopolitan.^107 East Germans also tuned in to the critical political
journalism shows on public television less frequently, preferring the tab-
loid programs on private television or the regional East German channel
MDR. This pointed not only to a specifi c East German identity-building
process, but also to a media-based demarcation directed against the old
FRG.
Advice and counseling formats held their ground in the magazine sec-
tor, which also refl ected a traditional, crisis-related use of media. For
example, the magazine Guter Rat (Good Advice), which fi rst appeared as
a women’s magazine in East Germany in 1945 and then continued as an
advice magazine, still exists; after 1990, it survived in the form of a con-
sumer magazine in East Germany published by West German companies.
Humor also continued to diff er between East and West: the satire maga-
zine Eulenspiegel has continued to be the East German counterpart to the
West German Titanic, just as the East German Mosaik has held its own
against the Disney comics of the West. The illustrated magazine Superillu
in particular has refl ected the ongoing diff erences in taste between East
and West. This weekly, put out by the Burda Verlag, has advertised that it
is read by a fi fth of East Germans, which is more than Der Spiegel, Fokus,
Stern, and Bunte all together. It succeeded with a mix of specifi cally East
German celebrity news, advice columns, and entertainment, thereby con-
tributing to the solidifi cation of a special East German consciousness. In
turn, it also fostered the success of the PDS.
Several studies from the 1990s show that the East German daily papers
strengthened a specifi c East German identity. The press often wrote from
an East German perspective, including attempts to point blame at “the
West.” Especially the former SED newspapers commented frequently
on the problems that had resulted from reunifi cation in the eyes of East
Germans, such as unemployment; they drew a clear line of demarcation