German Mediascapes

DAAD weekend: Fall 2007

Conference organizer Ute Maschke (Cornell University) opened up this year's DAAD weekend, “German Mediascapes,” with a performative demonstration of certain problems inherent to the medium of the power point presentation. By juxtaposing her spoken talk and the facile visuals of power point, Maschke indicated the need to approach the 'fourth estate'—i.e. news media in the public sphere— more critically. Questioning the relationship between media, consumers, and changing “modes of apprehending the world,” Maschke cited Hans Magnus Enzensberger's cynical understanding of the freedom of modern consumers of media to separate media consumption from the pursuit of truth. Maschke pointed out that although the traditional media of newspapers and radio are still the most-trusted, they are losing out in actual use to the much less-trusted medium of the internet; this raises the question of the possible role of what might be called an internet-based 'fifth estate.' After an electronic survey of conference participants on their media habits and awareness, Maschke concluded by inviting conference participants to rethink certain common fears about the future of media: that the end of newspapers is near, that an unhealthy amount of power is concentrated in the media business, that the emphasis on the local comes at the expense of the (inter)national, and that serious journalism will continue to turn into infotainment. (Carl Gelderloos)

Rüdiger Lentz, director of DeutscheWelle North and South America spoke next about the difficulties of distributing objective, well informed, and globally oriented news coverage in the current German-American media landscape. In his presentation titled "The Media Scene in Germany, and Deutsche Welle and The Atlantic Times as German Image Builders on the U.S. Market,” Lentz expressed concern over the increasing commercialization of German media. For Lentz, many media outlets place too much emphasis on the marketing of news that caters to what the public wants to hear rather than what it needs to know. This leads to news that belies the complexity of current issues and creates a media-based rift between the United States and Europe. To illustrate this point, Lentz cited two unscientific polls in German publications in which Germans responded overwhelmingly that America is a bigger threat to “peace and prosperity” than both Russia and Iran. Lentz believes that these responses are the result of misinformation and media bias.

Lentz discussed the specific role of Deutsch Welle in educating the world (and specifically the United States) about the “New Germany” and its role as integral part of the European Union. He also lauded the aims of the recently founded Atlantic Times, which targets elites with German news written in English by respected journalists. In the face of shifting American focus on Asian interests, the Atlantic Times recognizes a need to focus on “new realities, common interests, [and] economic ties” between Germany and the United States. His hope is that further progress in this direction may begin to straighten out skewed and harmful trends in international news reporting. In closing, Lentz offered recommendations for the improvement of the global media landscape. He urged journalists to restore credibility to the news media and to increase professionalism in the face of pressure for success and the “scoop.” Lentz called for trustworthy journalism that focuses on analysis and educating consumers about the complexity of contemporary political and economic issues. (Megan Eaton)

In the next talk, Patrizia McBride (Cornell University) thematized the relationship between “Avant-garde Art and Mass Media in Weimar Germany” through a reading of selected work by the Dadaist montage artist Hannah Höch. Through Höch’s work, McBride explored different ways that the Western European avant-garde “changed the traditional ways of looking at art through sustained confrontation with mass culture.” The avant-garde defined itself in opposition to a traditional understanding of art, where everyday commodities do not count as works of art and artistic objects are seen to be distinct from everyday life; one of the central innovations of the avant-garde was to “scramble” the contexts associated with everyday items not normally understood as art.

Höch’s work frequently commented on gender, femininity, and domesticity, and it scrutinized the media images of the “New Woman” that proliferated at the same time as the burgeoning of mass-distributed print and illustrated media in Weimar Germany. Using “Der Traum seines Lebens” (1925), “Deutsches Mädchen” (1930), and “Die Braut” (1933) as representative examples of Höch’s photomontage, McBride examined how the artist cut and combined images from magazines and periodicals to destabilize visual ideals of femininity, exoticism, fantasy, and sexual emancipation. The resulting artworks cause everyday images to signify in new ways and expose the complex semiotic networks that underlie visual media, encouraging a more active critical reading of visual culture on the part of the viewer. Höch’s work was thus integral in engendering new modes of seeing. What better subject for art, McBride purported, than one that shows us how the ordinary objects around us fill our lives with meaning. (Megan Eaton)

René Strien, director of Berlin-based publisher Aufbau Verlag, began his presentation with a brief overview of publishing in Germany in comparison to the United States. Strien explained that Germany is unique in that book prices are fixed; fixed book prices allow small bookstores and publishers to compete with chain stores and larger publishing houses, which in turn guarantees diversity. The German book market contains a great variety of titles and the book distribution system is highly complex. Nonetheless, bigger publishers and chain stores still alter market structures by manipulating shelf space. Strien also admitted that only major enterprises could sustain the distribution system and that there were almost too many titles, which often led to uneconomically small printing runs. With reading as the sixth most popular leisure-time activity in Germany, Strien expressed optimism for the future of German publishing.

Strien then turned to the history of the Aufbau Verlag, which received a license from the Russians immediately after World War II and became a publishing success story during and after the collapse of the GDR. It was one of the few publishing houses from the former East to survive reunification. Today it is a mid-size company with an annual turnover of about sixteen million Euros, and is one of the few remaining independent publishers in Germany. Strien highlighted the importance of the dialogic relationship between the publishing house and the readers, where the publishing house responds to the demands of the readers while at the same time bearing the responsibility to release high-quality books. He described the goal of Aufbau Verlag as enabling all readers feel like members of the human race by allowing them to see what they all have in common. Strien concluded his remarks by asking how we are to shape a media landscape that allows “old media” to thrive and develop new perspectives for the future. (Gizem Arslan)

Sabine Haenni (Cornell University) opened her talk on transnational cinema with a short video clip documenting the competition between Volker Schlöndorff’s Tin Drum and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.The Tin Drum is a German, French and Polish co-production, and as Schlöndorff explains (in good French), this is a fight of the David of Europe against the Goliath of America. In the 1960s, the authenticity of foreign films had been stamped by their origin in a single national context: co-productions and dubbing were considered “against the culture” in which the film was made. However, by 1979 it is not German but European cinema that is at stake. Haenni discussed the international and transnational engagements of the emerging European cinema by exploring two films, Schlöndorff’s The Circle of Deceit (Die Fälschung) from 1981 and Wim Wenders’s 1977 film, The American Friend.

In The Circle of Deceit, western journalists from different countries find themselves in the no-man’s land of the Green Line in Beirut, where civil war brings out the ugliest in national engagements. The film is decidedly multinational and multilingual, and slows down action to show the obstinacy of life in a city in chaos. The American Friend, is another co-production between France and Germany and is as much about European relations as about transatlantic relations. Haenni argued that the film appropriates the American gangster genre and includes a three-way exchange between a German, a Frenchman, and an American. In an extremely long and slow assassination scene, the clumsy assassin repeatedly stumbles against posters, embodiments of the transnational commodity market. According to Haenni, these films explore the negotiation of and creative engagement with the newly emerging European market. (Gizem Arslan)

In the evening continuation of the conference, David Bathrick (Cornell University) introduced the screening of The Legend of Paul and Paula to a lucky and select audience. This 1973 cult film from the GDR was directed by Heiner Carow and featured music by the band die Puhdys, a rock group that made its entrée into the German market through the film. Bathrick suggested that Paul and Paula came as a response to Erich Honecker’s encouragement of artists to experiment creatively, claiming that there would be no more state-ordered taboos in culture and in literature. Paul and Paula represented a new direction in GDR film because it did not have a seamless narrative and questioned certain societal norms about sexuality. As Bathrick argued, for a time in the GDR, the recipe for a good socialist film came from a Hollywood cookbook. Necessary ingredients included a positive hero/role model with strong identificatory potential, a strong plot and seamless narrative, and a happy ending.

The Legend of Paul and Paula is about a young man Paul and his extra-marital relationship to the free-spirited single mother Paula. Though Paul and Paula are eventually separated, Paul realizes later that he loves Paula, and his attempts to win her back render their love legendary. Bathrick pointed out the significance of the word “legend,” which can be understood as the story about a saintly person or a story much like a fairy tale. Paula wants to live in the present, and is full of integrity about fulfilling herself. In the end, she dies while giving birth to her and Paul’s son, whom Paul adopts. Bathrick concluded with an open question, asking whether Paula’s death represented that her failed self-fulfillment. (Gizem Arslan)

Conference organizer UteMaschke began the second day of the conference with extended reflections on how and to what end different media outlets decide what is news or news-worthy information, drawing on findings from the previous day’s presentations. Discussing diagrams that illustrated audience answers to a variety of questions about their use and awareness of German media, Maschke argued that surveys and polls reveal some things about historical and political reality while masking others. Encouraging students and faculty in the audience to be aware of how gaps arise in the media coverage of various political, cultural and historical phenomena, Maschke appealed to an engaged, active practice of media use that should, as she put it, “mind the gaps rather than try to bridge them.”

The first presenter, StefanieHarris (Northwestern University) used the occasion of the thirty-year anniversary of the “deutscher Herbst”— terrorist violence by the R.A.F. and affiliated groups in the fall of 1977— to reflect on how aesthetic and medial strategies can support or problematize dominant state-centered ideologies. Harris showed two cinematic representations of this period in German history, one from the collaborative film “Deutschland im Herbst” and one from a more recent TV docu-dramatization of a 1977 airplane hijacking, and contrasted the compositional and ideological strategies of both. She read “Deutschland im Herbst” to complicate the viewer’s understanding of Germany’s historical past by forcing the viewer to engage actively in the production of meaning, relating this strategy to Alexander Kluge’s notion of a counter or oppositional public sphere as a form of public debate that attempts to subvert dominant modes of opinion production in the mass media. The fact that this film was criticized both by the right and the left was a sign to Harris of the film’s productive complication of ideological categories and positions rather than of some inherent weakness of the film. She contrasted this kind of medial engagement with a more conventional docu-drama that worked with a simple, unproblematic notion of the role of the medium of film in thematizing the past.

Peter Gilgen (Cornell University) juxtaposed several different accounts of the relationship between politics and media in his paper “Mediacracy/Mediocrity.” Gilgen engaged with the ambiguity of his paper’s title as a way to question the notion of a political public sphere governed by the dictates of modern technological mass media, or what the German political scientist Thomas Meyer calls a “Mediocratie.” For Meyer, the mass media have ‘colonized’ the political system, moving extended political debate ever more towards the meaningless sound bite oriented to news cycles and advertising revenues rather than to the functioning of a healthy body politic. For Gilgen, Meyer simply reproduces traditional criticisms of democracy going back to Plato’s political philosophy. A more pragmatic account of political decision-making processes in a modern democracy, such as that by American critic Louis Menand, could temper Meyer’s pessimism about the persistent (and often frustrating) fact of modern voters’ relative ignorance about the basics of their political system. Gilgen then turned to Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and the notion of the relative differentiation of political and medial systems to propose an account of the distinctness, yet “structural coupling” of media and politics. Politics and media operate according to distinct logics for Luhmann, and for that reason do not have a direct causal effect upon each other as social systems. The cultural critic and social philosopher should look to sites where each system irritates the other’s logic rather than to places where one supposedly dominates or instrumentalizes the other.

The final paper of the conference by Mickey Reich-Casad (Cornell University) drew attention to the need for the re-conceptualization of notions of the collection of medial products in an archive typical to print and other materially tangible media. Digital information accessible on the Internet is characterized by an immateriality and transience unique in relation to other media; hence, the notion of a digital archive means something radically different from a print archive (i.e. library). Reich-Casad explored the theoretical ramifications of this paradigm shift, and how contemporary media artists attempt to thematize this medial instability and transience into their artworks. She discussed how the CD-Rom periodical journal project “Artintakt” put out by the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe dealt with issues of narrative and cultural memory in this new medium. Her paper culminated in a close reading of an interactive DVD artwork “The Last Cowboy” that juxtaposed images from the American West and from East Germany in an attempt to perform cultural identity in new ways. (Sean Franzel)