Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany by Karl Christian Führer;Corey RossReview by: Dominik GeppertJournal of Contemporary History, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Jul., 2009), pp. 542-544Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40543051 .

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542 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 44 No 3

Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross (eds), Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth -Century Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; 254 pp; $85.00 hbk; ISBN: 9780230008380

Long gone are the days when the media were regarded as a mere reflection of different parts of the public or as representations of specific social groups. Today they appear as an independent force which follows its own patterns of behaviour. This is especially true for the twentieth century, when the media became a mass phenomenon and when traditional societies were transformed into media societies in which media use emerged as the dominant leisure activity. So far, however, as the editors of this volume rightly point out, media history has all too often been confined to the analysis of technology, organizational struc- tures or aesthetic contents of the media. The attempt to analyse how modern mass media such as tabloids, film, radio, television or recordings have fitted into wider social and cultural developments is therefore highly welcome and much needed. Moreover, the editors' choice of twentieth-century Germany as the object of investigation is a shrewd one because of the country's unique role as a 'laboratory of modernity that has witnessed all three of the dominant political systems of the age: liberal democracy, fascism and communism' (4).

Accordingly, some of the most fascinating contributions to the volume explore German media history across different political regimes. One way to achieve this is via long-term chronological surveys, such as Corey Ross's inves- tigation of the rise of recorded music from the Empire to the Third Reich, or Patrick Major's account of Germany's culture wars against pulp fiction between the late nineteenth century and the 1970s. There are also comparative studies, such as Thomas Lindenberger's essay on the making of two German cinemas during the Cold War, or Konrad Dussel's comparison of radio orga- nization and radio programming in the Weimar Republic, under the nazis, and in divided Germany after 1945. Sometimes the comparative perspective is not immediately discernible, as in Karl Christian Fiihrer's compelling examination of American movies in nazi Germany, which goes beyond the years 1933 to 1939 mentioned in its title, and juxtaposes the rather positive reception of Hollywood movies under the NS regime with more reluctant reactions shown by German audiences and critics in the Weimar years. National Socialists, Führer concludes, 'were not hostile to American culture in general during the 1930s. American cultural populism clearly appealed to a political movement eager to create a new German Volksgemeinschaff (107).

Counter-intuitive as Führer's thesis may appear at first sight, it fits in well with findings in other essays which also emphasize the degree to which dicta- torial regimes were, at least partially, permeable to foreign media influence. In her contribution on television in East Germany, for instance, Heather Gumbert refers to a decision by the communist authorities in the late 1950s to undertake 'a time-consuming and costly conversion' of the broadcast standards of their equipment to the Western European standard, even paying for East Germans to convert their existing television sets to the new model (150). The intention

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Reviews 543

behind this move, it seems, was to broadcast GDR television to the greatest possible number of Germans in East and West. Significantly, the author con- cedes in a footnote, this determination had faded a decade later when the SED regime was faced with a similar decision, this time regarding the introduction of colour programming.

It is notoriously difficult to sum up the diverse findings of anthologies such as this in a few words, especially when they map out new territory, as Führer and Ross's volume clearly does. More than that, part of the charm of this col- lection of essays lies in the fact that the editors have not confined their authors to one single theory of the development of mass media in twentieth-century Germany. Rather, they have invited the contributors to look at the topic from different angles and test various arguments and methodological approaches. There are, however, at least three closely related themes which run through most of the essays. First, the heavily debated question of how the media impacts on the consumer recurs frequently. Most authors stress the indepen- dence and creativity of the recipients when it comes to appropriating what the media have to offer. The fact that the media propagated 'standardized' cultural artefacts, Führer and Ross assert, 'does not mean that they necessarily exerted standardizing effects, as the reception of these artefacts in public and in the home was by no means uniform or predictable' (7). Most essays therefore emphasize the limits of censorship and the negotiating character of the rela- tionship between writers and readers, programmers and audience, film-makers and their public, both in democratic societies and in dictatorships.

Second, there is the discussion about the connection between the media and the public sphere which, for a long time, was dominated by Jürgen Habermas's seminal work on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, origi- nally published in 1962. Although Habermas is cited only once, many authors implicitly refute the notion that an informed bourgeois public sphere degener- ated through expansion into a non-political system of cultural consumption. In his essay on German tabloids in Weimar Berlin, for instance, Bernhard Fulda convincingly demonstrates that tabloids were not simply providers of apoliti- cal sensations and entertainment to an increasingly homogenous group of literate urban consumers, but that the 'proliferation of tabloids in Berlin after 1918 was primarily driven by political concerns' (198). The twentieth-century history of the mass media in Germany cannot be reduced to the story of an increasing 'commercialization of the press', but should be viewed as a process of expansion and diversification designed to achieve both commercial and political aims.

The third complex of questions regards the relationship between social, cultural and political history. In their introduction, the editors classify their volume as a contribution to the 'cultural expansion of social history' (3). What their volume does, however, is more than that. For it also brings politics back into social and cultural history by demonstrating that, in an era of democrati- zation and consumption, the spheres of politics on the one hand, and culture, entertainment and leisure on the other, could not be kept as clearly separated

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544 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 44 No 3

from each other as before. As the media are not only a cultural artefact and indispensable means of communication within or between societies, but also business enterprises and political actors, they are strategically situated at the interface between different spheres which historians have often tended to treat separately. Media history is, thus, ideally suited to integrate cultural, social, economic and political history.

It would be too early to expect a blueprint for such an integrated history. The present volume, however, offers substantial new insights into an impor- tant field of research and also presents various suggestions as to which ques- tions such a history would need to address.

Dominik Geppert Freie Universität Berlin

Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008; xiv + 521 pp; £22.95 hbk; ISBN: 9780674024236

In 1994 Matthew Connelly co-authored an article with Paul Kennedy in the Atlantic Monthly entitled 'Must It Be the Rest Against the West?'1 The article followed a long and not-so-venerable tradition of fomenting fears of over- population and poverty in the Third World. 'Whether it's racist fantasy or real- istic concern, it's a question that won't go away,' the cover caption read. 'As population and misery increase, will the wretched of the earth overwhelm the Western paradise?'

Fourteen years of research and writing later, Connelly has done an about- face, producing a comprehensive history and significant critique of global movements of population control. Based on impressive archival research in the USA, Europe and India, and interviews with key players in the field, the book is rich in detail and evidence. While more explicit summation of key points would help readers navigate the long text, Connelly eloquently argues that the project of population control has undermined, if not outright violated, the human and reproductive rights of poor people around the world.

Policy interventions such as involuntary sterilization campaigns, the pushing of dangerous contraceptives on women, and making population control a higher budgetary priority than basic health care are the outcome of an ideology that essentially blames the poor for their own poverty and ignores the complex socio-economic forces and gender relations that shape fertility decisions. The fatal misconception of population control proponents, from powerful élites to family planning personnel out to meet targets of 'births averted', 'was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they knew it them-

1 Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, 'Must It Be the Rest Against the West?' Atlantic Monthly 274(6) (December 1994), 61-84.

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