Propaganda within the GDR was a complex and at times contradictory entity. There was no analogue to a direct and discrete government agency like the Third Reich's Propagandaministerium under Goebbels within the SED dictatorship. Nonetheless, the state did produce a volume of agitprop and controlled the GDR's media landscape. Counter-intuitively, propaganda was perhaps more centralized than in the Third Reich despite the lack of an official state ministry. This situation was the result of much of the propaganda work being centralized under the auspices of the Party, not the state.

One of the truisms for understanding how the USSR and Warsaw Pact nations operated was that the Party ruled, but did not govern. What this means is that while Party leaderships determined policy and direction for the ship of state, they were nominally separate from the organs of the state such as the Ministry of Education. There was considerable interplay between Party and state fiefdoms, but propaganda tended to be a bit more simplified in its arrangements than more complicated entities like state security or the planned economy. The apex of agitprop within the GDR was the responsible secretary for Agitation und Auslandsinformation (Agitation and Foreign Information) of the Central Committee of the Politburo for the SED (ZK). This agency of the Party first became part of the ZK in 1958 under the auspices of Albert Norden, a KPD emigre that had cut his media teeth in exile by editing a number of KPD publications such as its expose of the Reichstag fire. The ZK would split up the responsibilities of information in the 1970s, roughly dividing up the domestic and international agitprop duties between two secretaries. The ZK secretaries usually had some other duties within the GDR in addition to heading the SED's agitation departments. Norden's successor Werner Lamberz was a deputy to the Volkskammer (the GDR's toothless parliament) and his successor Joachim Herrmann was the editor of the SED's official newspaper Neues Deutschland. The ZK secretaries not only handled their own ministries within the Party, but they also coordinated propaganda lines with the chief media editors while forming a conduit to the chief KZ secretaries and the media. The Agitation department also put out its own official directives for propaganda and published Was und Wie: Informationen, Argumente, Übersichten für die Agitator, a newspaper outlining the official stance on events. The Agitation department was also responsible for producing media attacking the FRG. Norden was one of the chief editors for the various "Brown Books" detailing the lives of Nazi party members who had achieved success in the FRG. There were also local branches for the Agitation department for SED at levels of Bezirke (districts) and Kreise (counties). These local arms of the department would ensure ideological conformity among the local Party apparatus and communicate the various directives from the ZK.

However, propaganda and information battles within the GDR were not as simple as a Party agency directives filtering from top to down below. The Agitation department often intertwined with Party and state agencies like educational ones in an at time rather confusing tangle of overlapping responsibilities. Kurt Hager, for example, was a ZK member without portfolio but leapt between responsibilities for culture and education. Hager took an active interest in the nation's arts scene and was a very active public intellectual for the SED. The Deutscher Fernsehfunk (German Television Association/DFF) was a state agency with significant Party representation within it. The Agitation department would vet and direct some of DFF's programming, but longtime DFF chief Heinz Adameck was also a KZ member. In more elevated matters, the state also sponsored the Kulturbund (Cultural Association) for the nation's writers, artists, playwrights, and other intellectuals. The Kulturbund was a voluntary umbrella organization and membership opened up local cultural organizations for state largess. Aufbau was the flagship journal for the Kulturbund and its articles mixed both agitprop and more elevated digressions into the nature of art and philosophy.

Nor was the GDR's media landscape a completely monolithic one dominated by state and Party agencies working in tandem to produce dull agitprop. DFF programming benefited from the fact that many of the ZK's members did not fully understand or grasp the significance of this newfangled media. This meant that DFF operated on a looser leash than other forms of media, especially in its first decade. Adameck tightened up the ideological reins of DFF after reports of ZK displeasure at its programming. Likewise, the subsidiary organizations of the Kulturbund tended to ignore or play lip-service to the ideological directives that came from the SED. The state-run film agency DEFA occasionally ran afoul of the Agitation department or other members of the ZK for its films, but it was able to weather these ideological tempests because DEFA was a powerful state entity in its own right.

This is not to say though that media under the SED was divided between government loyalists and creators yearning for freedom. Entities like the Kulturbund or DEFA did encourage its members to self-coordinate to the ideological line of the Party and state. SED membership was not mandatory for success in state media, but either membership or friendly relations with the SED were often necessary for career advancement. Victor Klemperer's diary entries on his experience in the Kulturbund do bear witness to how those intellectuals who did not conform could be drummed out of the organization and cut off from the arts scene. DFF's programming such as the spy adventure series Das unsichtbare Visier did not conform to the elevated precepts of German higher culture married with socialism that the SED's cultural luminaries like Hager bloviated over. Yet Das unsichtbare Visier toed the Party line about the outside world and had its sleeper Stasi protagonist infiltrate cabals of former Nazis and Western imperialists even as it catered to baser instincts such as this dance number where scantily clad women celebrate an engagement party.

The GDR's propaganda was the result of intertwining of various state and Party relationships and entities. SED members within state agencies and organizations might produce propaganda within the guidelines set by the ZK's Agitation department. Conversely, other creators produced media that conformed to the official Party line because of how media was organized within the GDR. This amalgamation of voluntary and compelled propaganda dominated the GDR's media and lent it a ideological conformity despite the lack of an official state agency for agitprop.

Sources

Bytwerk, Randall L. Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004.

Fulbrook, Mary, and Andrew I. Port. Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities After Hitler. New2013.

Gumbert, Heather L. Envisioning Socialism Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2014.

Heiduschke, Sebastian. East German Cinema DEFA and Film History. New York: Palgrave, 2013.