TRANSMITTING REVOLUTION: RADIO, RUMOR, AND THE 1953 EAST GERMAN UPRISING
Michael Palmer Pulido
Marquette University, 2017
This project examines public opinion in the Dresden Region of the German
Democratic Republic from the end of World War II through the summer of 1953. I argue
that the Socialist Unity Party (SED) projected its legitimacy through an official public
sphere by representing publicness to its citizenry. Through banners, the press, and
choreographed public demonstrations, it aimed to create the appearance of popular
support. Even more significantly, the SED used radio to ground its legitimacy in a
burgeoning post-war internationalism that bound residents of the GDR in an imagined
community of socialist nations under Stalin’s leadership.
At the same time, the regime’s opponents challenged its legitimacy and credibility
through a rival public sphere. In this space, foreign broadcasters, especially Radio in the
American Sector (RIAS), chipped away at the regime’s credibility and prestige while
improvised news and rumor undermined the Party’s state building efforts.
Tensions boiled over in the summer of 1953 when RIAS and rumor helped make
revolution thinkable. On the seventeenth of June, East Germans took to the streets in
hundreds of cities and protested the government. RIAS endowed the occasion with
national imaginings before and after East German police and Soviet forces ended the
protestors’ hopes for change.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1711&context=dissertations_mu
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