Purpose of the project

The purpose of the project "Entangled television histories" has been to investigate the contacts, relationships, networks and programme exchanges between GDR and Sweden in the field of television from the end of the 1960s until Germany's reunification with an emphasis on the 1970s. A central theoretical concept in the study is entangled history, which in combination with a social network analysis has been employed to make individual agents and their relationships visible. Main research questions of the project have revolved around not only people, ideas and television programmes that traveled across national borders, but also what expressions and forms the transnational cultural practice took and what happened in the process of transfer.

In the project follow-up (Oct 2016), some changes made in the project’s research design were reported. In a first step, adjustments were made to heed the external reviewers’ recommendations. One such recommendation was to place a clearer emphasis on the exchange of specific programme genres, in particular children's programmes. Other changes were unavoidable consequences of the archival challenges that the project faced already at its commencement in 2015. At that point, the SR documentary archive had just been subject to heavy cuts and as a result, research services became limited. For my project, this led to a necessary – but also creative – formulation of new research directions and, not least, a shift in emphasis towards the considerably more accessible East German archival material.

The project’s three most important results

First and in general terms, the project has been able to make visible, through empirical analyses, how contact between Swedish and East German television was established and developed in the 1970s. Through highlighting the exchange and circulation between East and West (or more precisely east and neutral), the project has been able to challenge the traditional, bipolar notion of the European Cold War cultural landscape. Standing on the shoulders of earlier research on Cold War media cultures, in combination with the less illuminated aspects of transnational television, the project has contributed to a more specific and empirically founded knowledge of postwar interconnected Europe in which the expanding media sector took center stage.

One of two more specific results in the project concerns Swedish television. In contrast to current notions of a strong left-wing orientation at SVT in the 1970s, this project has been able to point to a significant recoding of East German tv material on Swedish television. One example is the East German animatedd children's production Unser Sandmännchen, which in the transfer to Sweden was transformed from a gentle communist bedtime story to the in part ironically framed and thoroughly commercialized Swedish phenomenon John Blund. Individual cultural entrepreneurs played a very important role in this process of recoding and appropriation. Among other things, this makes it impossible to make sweeping generalizations about an East German ideological cultural propaganda in Swedish television in the 1970s.

The second of the project's two more specific results concerns the East German television’s substantial interest in and orientation towards Sweden. The archive material at the Deutsche Rundfunkarchiv (DRA) in Potsdam-Babelsberg shows an extensive engagement that the DDR-Fernsehen added to the contacts with SR / SVT, while comparable sources in Sweden do not testify to such a high degree of interest. Studies in the project have shown the symbolic and practical significance of the Swedish contacts in the DDR's struggle for legitimacy in the field of media. The fact that the GDR in the mid-1970s had a stationed television foreign correspondent in Stockholm at a time when correspondents already had become increasingly expensive investments testifies to the significance placed on Scandinavia.

New research questions

A number of new research questions and the need for further research have been identified. An area that early caught my interest is transnational radio, and one study in the project about Radio Berlin International and its Swedish broadcasts has opened up a new research venue. Another path worth following is of a more methodological kind and concerns media archives and their (media) historical depositories, the development and design of audiovisual collections and their accessability, something that the project made me most aware of. A third issue would circle around not only transnational television’s bilateral relationships, but around the complex international, or rather supranational, context of co-operation within and between the Eurovision and the Intervision in an East-West perspective. Nordic television collaborations are also interesting to explore in this Cold War context, and the project has taken some first steps in this direction through the creation of a research group.

International contacts and collaborations

The project has been carried out in close collaboration with and functioned as an engine in several network or project collaborations, where complementary funding has enabled the initiation of several research group constellations. The most sustainable research group has been "Transborder television. The Nordic Countries and the GDR in the 1970s ”, in which the Crafoord Foundation provided funding for two postdoctoral fellows from Denmark and Finland, Sune Bechmann Pedersen and Laura Saarenmaa. This enabled an important and constructive broadening of the RJ project to include other Nordic countries. In particular, the Finnish–GDR television collaboration provides illustrative comparative insights for the RJ project on the relationship between Sweden and the GDR. Together with Saarenmaa, some more theoretical aspects of cultural diplomacy between the GDR and the Nordic countries (especially through the development of the concept "television diplomacy") have been fruitful for my own work. Together with Bechmann Pedersen, I have also worked with the more actor-oriented network approach that was already laid out in my project description, namely to follow in the footsteps of individual actors and analyse their network relations and everyday activities in transnational television, here with specific focus on GDR's foreign television correspondent in Scandinavia in the mid-1970s.

At the international level, the project activities have also been supported by and acted as a theoretical catalyst in the research network "Entangled Media Histories (EMHIS)", funded by STINT Institutional Grant, of which I have been the co-ordinator since 2014 and which has been conducted in very close cooperation with the Centre for Media History at Bournemouth University and the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research in Hamburg. In addition, I have presented the project at a considerable number of conferences and workshops, most of them international. Some of these are "Nordmedia 2015: Media presence – mobile modernities", Copenhagen University 2015; "Bridges and boundaries: Theories, concepts and sources in communication history", ECREA Communication History Section, Warwick University, Venice 2015; ”In the flow: People, media, materialities”, ACSIS conference, Linköping University 2015; "Society for the History of Children and Youth Biennial Conference: Transition, Transaction, and Transgression", Rutgers University, USA 2017; "Tracing entanglements in media history", Lund University, 2017; "Remapping European media cultures in the Cold War: Networks, encounters, exchanges", University of Minnesota, USA, 2017; "Svenska historikermötet 2017", Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, 2017; and "Centers and peripheries: Communication, research, translation", 7th ECREA conference, Lugano, Switzerland, 2018. Several guest research stays have been made possible within the framework of the project, including one shorter stay at the Centre for Media History, Macquarie University, Australia, and another one at the Centre for Media History, Bournemouth University, UK. The project has thus been vital to foster the establishment of research contacts overseas as well as within Europe and Scandinavia.

Synergies and collaboration

For several years, the research project has generated student essay topics in media history at the Department of Communication and Media in Lund. It has also been able to be translated into teaching within the framework of the interdisciplinary master's program Film and Media History, also at Lund University. At an overall level, and in line with our university’s strategic plan, where the interlinking of research, teaching and external collaboration is expected to marinate all activities, the project has stimulated pedagogical development through its focus on transnational and transmedial perspectives in media-historical education as well as research. Cooperation with the rest of society has primarily taken the form of popular science lectures, for example at the so-called HT-dagarna in Lund 2017.