My question is broadly about the prevalence of western media in East Germany, and how the state really reacted to its citizens consuming officially disapproved media, and if there is some current research about this.
I am using "Star Wars" as the entry point to this question. Being grown up myself in the far west of Germany in the 1970s/1980s, I very well remember how much of a sensation the "Krieg der Sterne" movie stirred. It was prominently reviewed in television, even one of the most popular game shows had a special issue where an actor in a C-3PO costume was reading the questions for the contestants. As west german television was widely watched in East Germany, most people there would have known about this ground-breaking space opera movie that everybody in the western world want to see.
Now more than 30 years after the fall of the wall, there are mostly anecdotal, contradictory, and often romanticizing stories floating around about how the usage of western media in the GDR really was. One urban legend says that children were asked by their teacher how the clock in the evening news looked like (west german news 'Tagesschau' had a different one than the east german 'Aktuelle Kamera'), and when a child gave the wrong answer, it was added to the Stasi records, and could bring its parents into trouble.
Between people on the one extreme who are glorifying the GDR, and the other side where this place is painted as a schizophrenical oppressive dictatorship where you had to be paranoid all the time, I'm looking for reliable information how it really was. Is there reliable historical research going on about this? It is basically these questions:
How prevalent was western media in the GDR? Not only TV, but also movies (as illegal copies, how? super-8? VHS?) Books, magazines etc.
What was really the official stance on citizens that were consuming western media? Was it just disapproved, or could one get into real trouble? Could our hypothetical twentysomething be denied entry to university just for expressing the desire to see a space opera movie, when a nearby stasi informer was eavesdropping?
Were there privileged people who actually had more easy access to western media?
In 1970, the GDR film industry -- sponsored by the state to make socialist films -- was in trouble. Audience had dropped by 10 million between '66 and '70, costs were rising, and revenues were shrinking.
Increasingly, one thing was keeping the film industry afloat: Western films. The GDR imported Western movies from the very beginning to show officially on screens. The selection was curated, mind you, but even without accessing a black market, Western movies were popular: more popular than anything the GDR produced, and audiences were willing to pay more to see a Western movie than a GDR-produced one.
In the early 1970s films were individually requested, but this became too costly (and demand was still increasing) so film officials went to various festivals to pick and choose. They tended to social-critique films, showing the West as crime-ridden and gritty (one of the first imports from "New Hollywood" was In the Heat of the Night; they also, predictably, imported Chinatown), but also comedies and musicals. They avoided war films and science fiction, considering them to glorify violence.
To pick a specific film, The Strawberry Statement (1970, GDR release 1973) is about student protests at Columbia University, and includes a scene where a protester is killed by a policeman during a demonstration. It was recommended the film be shown prominently in university towns and that it "demonstrates the dangers of US imperialism and showcases a disillusioned image of the capitalist system".
Little Big Man (1970, GDR release 1972) was also considered a shoo-in by the film pickers (2 years turnaround is a rush job), and tells the story of Jack Crabb (played by Dustin Hoffman) being raised by Native Americans and is essentially a comedic Western with an indigenous perspective; it has a memorable performance by Richard Mulligan as General Custer. GDR reviews made sure to make regular references to Vietnam and the My Lai Massacre.
Homosexuality and drug use were verboten, so they passed on some films you might expect to play well to the social-critique angle (like Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider).
Finances certainly played a role in imports, especially in the late 1970s to the 1980s when the film industry was getting especially squeezed and budgets kept dwindling. The would have liked to get Apocalypse Now but had to pass ("Based on the current economic situation, an adoption of the film is not possible") even though it would play perfectly to anti-US-military sentiment.
By the 80s, pragmatism about costs meant ideology was dropping away, and the main priority was simply picking films that would get enough viewers ("a million viewers" being the goal). Hollywood blockbusters became the norm. The highest money maker in 1987 was Beverly Hills Cop, followed by E.T. in 1988 and Dirty Dancing in 1989.
I'm missing a source to confirm if Star Wars made it to actual screens in GDR (UPDATE: source found and confirmed, while Star Trek: The Motion Picture made it, Star Wars did not). By the mid-80s (for someone looking for it) it would not have been hard to get a hold of. In general by then VHS tapes were widely spread amongst the Eastern Bloc. Tapes were often imported that were simply copied from TV (either from the country of origin, or even cross-border if the signal was strong enough) and sold on the black market. For example, in Poland, in 1984, the top movies watched on VHS were Emmanuelle I, Caligula, The Return of the Jedi, and E.T. Poland had an estimated 300,000 VCRs by 1986. (I don't have any GDR estimates, but I would expect something similar, mostly reliant on black-market import; buying one officially from the Intershop with Western goods would cost about 100 times a month's rent. Intershop prices generally did not match that of the actual goods.)
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The documentary Chuck Norris vs Communism goes into underground film watching culture in Romania. Here's a trailer.
Relatedly, I've written about Western literature imported into the Soviet Union, if you're curious what their take was on Catch-22 and Breakfast of Champions.
Dunnett, P. (2010). The World Television Industry: An Economic Analysis. United Kingdom: Routledge.
Horten, G. (2020). Don't Need No Thought Control: Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Berghahn Books.
Mattelart, T. (1999). Transboundary flows of western entertainment across the Iron Curtain. Journal of International Communication, 6(2), 106-121.