Empty reels of videotape pop like bowling balls on doors and banisters. What they usually keep tightly wrapped is lying around as ribbon salad. You could wade through, but you run the risk of getting caught in the video lianas on the ground. On the evening of December 31, 1991, a storm raged through the S5A studio complex of the German television station (DFF) in Berlin-Adlershof. When it wears off, part of the historical memory of a newscast is gutted that has been known for years as a Current camera, since 1990 as Current, has been broadcast. Who rioted? Was it technicians and cutters, mostly younger colleagues around 30? Or angry editors? And what drove them? Probably anger, desperation and the certainty that tomorrow I will no longer be able to work for this station. Walls are not spared from revolt in the news center. What is there brushed on in black reads like “OUT” and “OUT” and “SALE”. The chest becomes tight from the word that is not said. Relax your arms from the pressure of action.
I belong here, have that until the end Late journal moderated and came to say goodbye like everyone who doesn’t want to spare themselves this. When I get there, the riot in the hallway is over, only the consequences can be sustained. 30 years later, have the impressions of that night long been dependent on fleeting images, almost forgotten or reliably suppressed? To remember is to get caught in a flash of distressing scenes. As soon as they appear, they sink back into the safe custody of what is difficult to find.
To the facts: On the last day of 1991, the evening news from 7.30 p.m. is the last live broadcast from Berlin-Adlershof. 7.55 p.m. still the sport with the preview of the New Year’s ski jumping in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, then the weather. What can be seen until midnight is canned. The new program of the Berlin cabaret The thistle and the New Year’s Eve in the Rostock harbor bar. If Kuddeldaddeldu played out, then so did the German television network.
Article 36 of the Unification Treaty decreed that “the institution” (this means radio and television in the GDR) is to be dissolved or transferred to the public-law structures of the East German states. However, these – at the beginning of the 1990s, with the exception of Brandenburg exclusively governed by the CDU – are only interested in technology and the archive, not in the staff or the institution itself. The option of adding the DFF as the third national provider in the public service portfolio alongside ARD and ZDF is seen as an impertinence in the West. Competition could hurt business more than stimulate it. Innovations might be initiated that will free the public-law system from its reform backlog. Better to maintain the status quo and be faced with the existential question three decades later.
Rudolf Mühlfenzl, since October 1990, following personal intervention by Chancellor Helmut Kohl as broadcasting officer East, the enforcer of Article 36, can be photographed with a clapperboard in his lap on that rainy New Year’s Eve when the DFF strikes. It says: “DFF – the last one”. For this motif, the governor-general for handling Ostfunk and the Ostfunker sit in front of a monitor wall in Adlershof. The look oscillates between self-irony and the need for recognition of the hunter spoiled for prey. During his 15 months in office, Mühlfenzl sometimes indulged in compassionate self-pity. He must take on the dirty work of an executor, endure ostracism and disgrace. But now the work is done, the flap in your lap shows bravery in the face of the enemy. The hunter’s custom is to put one foot on the still warm body of the game that has been killed. And can’t be seen what was hunted down?
For 39 years and ten days, since December 21, 1952, programs have been produced in Adlershof, later in the Johannisthal (television drama) and Grünau (entertainment) branches. Thanks to an advertising contract with the French company IP from the end of 1989, Ostfernsehen was allowed to survive the lost state by more than a year. Eleven months are missing from the magical 40 years when the iron curtain falls.
There is no shortage of requests for clemency. A recommendation is the sudden leap in acceptance by the Eastern media after the resignation of Erich Honecker on October 18, 1989. Since then, the media turnaround has been driving the political turnaround in part. The live transmission of the rally on East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989, which was won internally in the DFF, is just the beginning. The news broadcast Current camera (AK) has ratings of around 35 percent, with a peak value of 62.6 on December 8th, when a special SED congress renamed the party SED-PDS the night before and elects Gregor Gysi as the new party leader. Is this audience reaction proof that a socialist party is not yet an obsolete model in the ailing GDR?
As the DFF audience research shows and the GfK television research in Nuremberg confirms, the popularity of the Adlershof program will not change much until mid-1990. In the weeks leading up to the Volkskammer election on March 18 alone, the AK has ratings between 28 and 42 percent, in absolute numbers 3.6 to 5.5 million viewers. The program added to the first program at the end of October 1989 met with a similar response Thursday talk, which is dedicated to the upheavals in the GDR and can book an average of 29 percent (3.6 million viewers).
At this time, radio and television have long ceased to be “state radio”. The media resolution of the People’s Chamber of February 5, 1990 seals the independence of the government and parties. The DFF alone added 64 new formats to its program between 1989 and 1991, although there is no realistic perspective and the budget is no longer guaranteed by the state, but can be generated itself. The springboard for renewal is the management staff, often elected by the workforce, with whom colleagues often return who were previously fired or who wanted to leave because they could no longer stand a regulated creativity.
At the beginning of 1991, the Infas & Partner demoscopes asked East Germans: Which television station offers you the best orientation aid when living and working conditions are changing as fundamentally as is happening now? ZDF attested 15 percent, ARD 26 percent and DFF 29 percent. A trust bonus for Adlershof, which, however, does not make a recommendation, but rather suggests possible media resistance if the industrial deforestation is rampant in the east. To proclaim plurality does not mean wanting to risk it.
A good three weeks after the last broadcast night, I’m back in Adlershof to be interviewed for a documentary about the DFF. The fury of destruction has shifted to the outside world. In front of a wing of the S5A complex, in which the foreign editorial office was housed, furniture is piled high: desks, chairs, cupboards, shelves. Apparently a clearance team has made its rounds and made short work of it. The same principle applies when dealing with national wealth in the East: Nothing can stay as it was. In the broadcast control room of the former news studio, the consoles for sound and image editing have been cannibalized into skeletons made of wood or veneer. Only the buttons on the telephones continue to shine happily. The second hand of the studio clock moves silently but steadily over the dial above the monitors, on which the preview images of the tape machines, connected correspondents or the international news exchange were once located. So much was stopped and switched off, but not time.
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