Images from the Moon: Coverage on GDR Television

Until the American moon landing, the Soviet Union was also able to hold its own in the power-political race for scientific, technological and ultimately geostrategic supremacy in space with spectacular success stories. The associated messages of supposedly peace-securing space research, socialist performance and an optimistic belief in progress were disseminated throughout the entire sphere of influence as an identity-creating narrative, both internally and externally, and inscribed in the collective memory. As central discourses of domination, they constructed a mental map of Eastern Europe. The aim was to mark ideological, semantic and cultural differences and to distinguish oneself with a positive self-description from the phalanx of pluralistic democracies that propagated freedom of opinion and further human rights or advertised free-market potency and individual lifestyles-and in many cases were convincing. Thus, the extraterrestrial spheres also determined numerous cross-genre offerings of GDR television as prominent media events: ‘Cosmovision’ became one of the paradigmatic ‘general themes’ like internalized anti-fascism, the transfigured workers’ movement or the demonstration of economic and military strength. The broadcasts coordinated with this can be interpreted as a socialist-coded television mission, which was based on the same ideological premises in the interconnected ‘people’s democracies’. Coverage, commentary and reappraisal around space activities and their protagonists permeated the programming extensively, persistently and effectively from the late 1950s to the 1970s. The radio media in East Germany were particularly prominent in this respect. As a transit country, the GDR was located at the interface of the two social systems in international program transmission. Externally, it had to represent the ‘socialist world system’ and internally, it had to prove its competitiveness against the West German reference and class society on a daily basis.