The 'experiential community': early German television and media theory

• Published in: Screen (London) 2011-03, Vol.52 (1), p.46-62
• Main Author: Heins, Laura
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Arnheim, Rudolf; Art forms; Fascism; German television; Hainisch, Leopold; Ideology; Mass media; Media theory & criticism; Nazi era; Spectator; Television history; Television technology; Television viewing; Theoreticians; Wagenführ, Kurt
• ISSN: 0036-9543; 1460-2474
• DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjq051

Heins investigates texts by media theorists of the 1930s-40s who anticipated and responded to the introduction of regular television broadcasting in Germany in 1935. She focuses primarily on theorists writing from within the Third Reich, such as Kurt Wagenführ and Leopold Hainisch, but contrasts their responses to those of more well known early television theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim. This discussion is framed by references to postwar media theory. By tracing how early theorists defined the medium specificity of television in both its formal-technological properties and spectator effects, she traces how the Nazis conceived of the ideological and aesthetic possibilities of the new medium, in contradistinction to both pre- and post-war antifascist television criticism. Third Reich media theorists attempted to position television as a literate high art rather than as a mass medium, and proposed that television's essential qualities were its intimacy, realism, and "spirituality," all of which supposedly allowed for a more direct appeal to and ideological interpellation of the spectator than in any other art or media form.