“Now That Was Lunavision”: The First Manned Moon Landing on ARD

On the occasion of the first manned moon landing on July 20/21, 1969, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) produced a special broadcast lasting almost 24 h for the federal broadcast service ARD. Today, the broadcast enjoys legendary status. In contrast to many other broadcasters’ Apollo 11 coverage, it has been preserved to a large extent, as has the associated correspondence in the WDR archives. On the basis of these sources, this paper presents the program in its genesis, its structure and its procedure, as well as its contemporary reception. It shows how the program operates with three frequently overlapping levels of observation—a scientific-technical, a political and a self-referential one –, taking implicit and explicit positions against the background of the Cold War. Thus, in the mode of scientific reporting, a German authorship of the moon landing is dicussed in an uncritical manner. This appropriation contrasts with the self-reflective and emphatically balanced observer position that the program emphasizes in its explicit treatment of political issues. In turn, political and self-referential moments mix when the Apollo coverage in other countries is repeatedly brought up. For the journalists in the studio, the moon landing is primarily a global media event in the hour of its realization; the historical-philosophical classification is left to prominent voices from culture, the church, and the humanities and social sciences. A brief examination of the broadcast’s contemporary reception shows that various viewer reactions and press commentaries also rated the technical and educational achievement of television as at least equal to the actual spaceflight undertaking. A comparison with the subsequent Apollo broadcasts on ARD and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) demonstrates how unique the media event Apollo 11 was for space coverage on West German television.