Entangled Entertainment: Cinema and Television in Cold War Berlin

East and West Berlin were entangled in a multitude of ways. Despite their competing systems, there were numerous connections between the two halves of this divided city both before and after the erection of the Wall. Modern entertainment culture was a very important example. It was a driving force in the process of entanglement, overcoming both social and spatial boundaries. This is a key reason why popular entertainment was frequently politicised, despite being rooted in the simple need for entertainment. This particularly applies to the post-war period, marked by a confrontation between systems, in which audiovisual media in particular offered cross-border entertainment and therefore became the focus of heated political conflicts. The entanglement and politicisation of modern entertainment culture are particularly manifest in East and West Berlin, as will be shown in the lecture with respect to the Berlin neighbourhoods of Friedrichshain (East) and Kreuzberg (West) by focusing on cinema and television in Cold War Berlin.

Hanno Hochmuth is Executive Manager and Research Fellow at the Leibniz Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung/Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF). In 2016 he obtained his PhD at the Free University of Berlin. He studied history, theatre studies and communications at the Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Minnesota. From 2005 to 2011 he was a Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, where he planned and managed Germany’s first Master’s programme in Public History. His research focuses on urban and public history.

Suggested Literature for Lecture

Hochmuth, Hanno. At the Edge of the Wall Public and Private Spheres in Divided Berlin. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021.

Copyright

CC BY-NC-SA