Like a small trip back to the GDR”? East German evaluations of the television serial Weissensee and its authenticity in a dynamic discourse landscape

Bibliographic Data

ID8247261
AuthorsMaría Löblich (Freie Universität Berlin, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume8
Issue1
Pages41-58
Publication date2026-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNordic Journal of Media Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2003-184X • E-ISSN: 2003-184X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.2478/njms-2026-0003
OpenAlexW7140124777
LanguageEN
References cited26

In this article, I take the example of the historical German television fiction success Weissensee and ask how East Germans have read and judged the way this serial constructed their past more than a decade after its television premiere. This question is raised against the background that Weissensee was produced at a time when all questions related to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) seemed to have been answered. In the meantime, the remembrance discourse has changed. Hall’s encoding/decoding model, Giddens’s identity theory, and Sabrow’s typology of memories of the GDR provided the theoretical framework. Empirically, this study draws on five focus groups of East Germans, and the findings demonstrate that the dominant media memory, the dictatorship discourse, still operates within three reading positions. More recent discourses are visible but have not (yet) expanded the horizon to relocate oneself in the past. This study contributes to the rare research on authenticity from an audience perspective

Democracy · Dictatorship · German · Identity (music · Meaning (existential · Reading (process · Typology · Weimar Republic · European history and politics · German History and Society · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

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