Nicholas J. Schlosser. Cold War on the Airwaves

On the early morning of June 15, 1953, the broadcast station Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) in Berlin reported that workers in the Soviet zone of the city were planning to go on strike. Although the ruling communist party in the East’s German Democratic Republic (GDR), the State Socialist Unity Party (SED), had announced that it would abandon Stalinization policies and embark on a “New Course” on June 11, it emphasized that the current high work quotas would not be reduced. Workers’ protests therefore spread throughout the GDR, culminating in a full-fledged popular uprising on June 17, which forced Soviet military authorities to declare a state of emergency and martial law. RIAS quickly seized the golden opportunity to discredit the East German “Workers’ and Peasants’ State” by denouncing it as a totalitarian dictatorship. Radio propaganda has been a neglected field of research in the historiography of the Cold War. Nicholas J. Schlosser’s Cold War on the Airwaves: The Radio Propaganda War against East Germany therefore is a welcome contribution to scholarship on the global confrontation between the Western states and the Soviet-led camp in general, and on the propaganda war in Germany and in Berlin as a hot spot of the Cold War in particular. Concentrating on RIAS from its inception in 1946 to the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, Schlosser rejects simplistic models of communication. By contrast, he argues that “the symbiotic relationship between broadcaster and listener transformed RIAS into an influential force in East Germany” (2). On the basis of this proposition, the author elaborates on four major themes: (1) the tension between objectivity and propaganda; (2) the role of journalists and radio stations in the development of political culture; (3) the relationship between American officials and German actors at RIAS; and (4) the impact of the Cold War on the programs of RIAS and competing radio stations in the GDR.

Communism · Democracy · Dictatorship · Economic history · German · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law