Kirsten Bönker

Julia Obertreis

Sven Grampp

From the mid-1950s onwards, the rise of television as a mass medium took place in many East and West European countries. As the most influential mass medium of the Cold War, television triggered new practices of consumption and media production, and of communication and exchange on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This volume leans on the long-neglected fact that, even during the Cold War era, television could easily become a cross-border matter. As such, it brings together transnational perspectives on convergence zones, observations, collaborations, circulations and interdependencies between Eastern and Western television. In particular, the authors provide empirical ground to include socialist television within a European and global media history. Historians and media, cultural and literary scholars take interdisciplinary perspectives to focus on structures, actors, flow, contents or the reception of cross-border television. Their contributions cover Albania, the CSSR, the GDR, Russia and the Soviet Union, Serbia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, thus complementing Western-dominated perspectives on Cold War mass media with a specific focus on the spaces and actors of East European communication. Last but not least, the volume takes a long-term perspective crossing the fall of the Iron Curtain, as many trends of the post-socialist period are linked to, or pick up, socialist traditions.

Television Beyond and Across the Iron Curtain

Anke Stephan

oral history und (post)sozialistische Gesellschaften

Erinnerungen nach der Wende

Marie-Janine Calic

Dietmar Neutatz

In den 1970er Jahren stieß die westliche Industriemoderne an ihre Grenzen. Ein ausgeprägtes allgemeines Krisenbewusstsein war die Folge. Wie aber stellte sich die Lage in Osteuropa dar? Gab es hier eine vergleichbare Entwicklung? Dieser Frage gehen die Beiträge am Beispiel der beiden sozialistischen Vielvölkerstaaten Jugoslawien und Sowjetunion nach. Untersucht werden Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Kultur, insbesondere die Nationalitätenfrage und die Außenpolitik. Dabei wird deutlich, dass sich beide Staaten in einer verborgenen Krise befanden, die sowohl aus der globalen Entwicklung als auch aus den inneren Widersprüchen des Systems resultierte. Die Krisensymptome waren in Expertenkreisen bekannt, wurden aber weder von der politischen Führungsspitze noch der breiteren Bevölkerung wahrgenommen.

The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s

The Crisis of Socialist Modernity

This book attempts to conceptualize the 1970s as a crucial period of change of the 20th century as a whole, and in particular in the Communist world. It aims at comparing the national histories of socialist Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union by identifying common patterns of social-economic developments, political transformation, intellectual debates, and individual perceptions.

Julia Obertreis

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