2023-10-03 12:20:47
This is a text on the special for the Day of German Unity that the editorial team of the Berliner Zeitung put together. Read all texts online here.
Why is it that whenever you watch an ARD documentary about the East, you always get the impression that it was not an East German in Frankfurt an der Oder, but a West German in Frankfurt am Main who took over the editorial supervision and approval?
Why does one get the impression that every time the public broadcasters report on Poland, there seems to be an undertone, as if someone was whispering quietly in the background and secretly wanted to make it clear to the audience that the country’s problems are essentially a symptom of Slavism? Are backwardness that the well-stocked West will abolish? As if the shift to the right and fatigue with democracy were something genuinely Eastern European and not something that affected Europe as a whole.
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The BRD glasses
I have the impression that the media public in Germany, especially the mainstream media public, has put on a filter that, 33 years after reunification, still has something instructive, pedagogical, know-it-all and educative about it. As if editors, authors, intellectuals were a little afraid to dare to change perspective and examine the reasons for the social frustrations that clearly prevail in West and East Germany and also in Eastern Europe, in a broader context and sometimes through the eyes of others, yes, to understand the East.
As if there were still this BRD filter that, like looking through glasses, colors every object appropriately, a pair of BRD glasses that editors and authors put on in order to filter the view of their viewers, with the aim of drawing the sharp political dividing line between “Out there” and not to put your own certainty in jeopardy.
You have to allow yourself a different filter
I can’t help but think of a letter from Heinrich von Kleist, which the poet sent to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge to illustrate his skepticism about reality (and weariness with life). This letter, I would like to send it to ARD. Kleist’s lines, written on March 22, 1801, read: “If all people had green glasses instead of eyes, they would have to judge the objects they see through them. are green – and they would never be able to decide whether their eyes show them things as they are or whether it adds something to them that does not belong to them but to the eye. That’s how it is with the mind. We cannot decide whether what we call truth is really truth or whether it just seems that way to us. It’s the last one, like that is “The truth that we collect here is no longer there after death – and all efforts to acquire property that will follow us into the grave are in vain.”
At some point in the East-West debate we lost awareness of this type of constructivism. I also think that this lack of awareness is the central reason why Dirk Oschmann’s book “The East: a West German Invention” was so successful. Oschmann is a German scholar and knows about the filter that history, socialization and life experience impose on people. I’m pretty sure if there were more senior editors and editors-in-chief at ARD with an East German socialization, with the experience of the GDR and the upheaval, with an Eastern European identity, they would allow themselves different documentaries, different perspectives, a different filter.
A healthy German unity
I think what we need is the courage to swap the glasses for another, the West German gaze for the East German, to look at reality with a different filter. Anyone who believes that our media conveys pure objectivity, without filters, has not read enough Kleist. (Incidentally, this (self-)criticism of media impact and reception has nothing to do with hostility to democracy, on the contrary, this criticism strengthens democratic ideas.)
The ARD documentary “Listen to us! We East Germans and the West“, which was filmed by East German journalist Jessy Wellmer, is well-intentioned and yet proof of how the West filter works. I say it polemically: as if every non-conformist East German perspective had to be straightened out, corrected, and illuminated in the Western context. This impulse can be felt particularly in the confrontation between the presenter Jessy Wellmer and Dirk Oschmann, at the moment when the German scholar is quite clearly accused of populism. As if a West German ARD editor were whispering and couldn’t help but bang on Oschmann’s table and portray the intellectual as a disruptive force. And yet: There are voices that express themselves without taking the West filter into account. And that’s good.
The most impressive thing for me was the conversation in Jessy Wellmer’s documentary with the soccer coach Steffen Baumgart. An athlete, successful in the West, socialized in the East, who is proud of his past, proud of being an East German, without nostalgia or the desire for a new GDR, but with a pinch of anger and defiance. For me he says the central sentences that make the frustration in the East understandable: “What Ossi doesn’t like, and I don’t either, is that the West explains to me how I used to live and where I say: ‘You weren’t there there’.” Baumgart also seems to talk a little about journalists. This anger is an expression of the strenuous attempt to constantly keep the BRD filter at bay. And yet there is no way around it: we have to abandon it selectively if we want to have healthy German unity in the future.
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