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ABSTRACT: During the broadcast era, dominant culture reigned supreme on West German television. Das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen (zdf) achieved ratings of close to 74 percent during the long Saturday slot in the 1970s. This mass reach, especially of its live popular music programs with built-in audience votes, is often disregarded in historical arguments that focus on the political disunion of that decade. This article takes a closer look at two very different, yet exceptionally popular music shows, Deutsche Hitparade (1969-1984) and Disco (1971-1982), to investigate how the anxiety over sociopolitical change is negotiated on live television, how medium specificity intersects with constructions of masculinity and authority, and how different music and television formats question, manage and produce a national imaginary.
KEYWORDS: disco, gender, German television, Hitparade, televisual flow, ZDF
At first sight, two of the most popular music shows in German television history could not be more different: The Deutsche Hitparade, moderated by the staid bespectacled former car salesman Dieter Thomas Heck (alias of Carl Dietrich Heckscher), was filmed at Berliner Union-Film studio and premiered 1969 on the ZDF network,1 while Disco (1971-1982), filmed mostly at Studio Hamburg, featured the young gangly bow-tied Pee Wee Herman look-alike Ilja Richter. In 1972 Heck received the Goldene Kamera (Germany's Emmy) for his moderation of the Hitparade, Richter received that honor in 1977 for Disco. Ironically, thanks to digital media, especially YouTube, but also to archival digitization efforts on behalf of the networks, legions of collectors and fans have opened a vast archive of recorded content from the broadcast era. Because accessibility to that audio-visual content is still shifting as rules and regulations change and postings deteriorate or are taken down, this article hopes to preserve and analyze a snapshot of the two popular music programs and their contribution to German national identity formation and its struggle between diversity and homogeneity, as well as gender ambiguity and heteronormativity.
During the broadcast era, dominant culture reigned supreme. To understand the causes and effects of this, a short excursion into the organization and history of German television is justified. Between 1950 and 1984, Germany's mediascape consisted of two national public networks-ARD/Das Erste and ZDF/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen-in the West and one public network in the German Democratic Republic (the DFF...