Article,
West Berlin’s Critical Communication Studies and the Cold War: A Study on Symbolic Power from 1948 to 1989
History of Media Studies, (2022)
DOI: 10.32376/d895a0ea.d0db9590
Abstract
This paper examines how the West Berlin communication studies department, for over 40 years, was tied to or “disciplined” by the Cold War, leading to practices of exclusion and hegemony. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, we analyze how anticommunism as a discourse formed the habitus, capital, and field logic of West Berlin communication studies. Sources are archival material from Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin), minutes of Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin (parliament), press from East and West Germany, and autobiographical material and academic publications from West Berlin and West German communication scholars. The paper describes how the anticommunist discourse at first helped Emil Dovifat, professor and department director from 1928 on, to protect himself from attacks regarding his Nazi past and to reestablish his reputation after 1945. For his successor, the interim director Fritz Eberhard, the anticommunist discourse caused problems. Eberhard tried to consolidate the poorly reputed discipline at Freie Universität Berlin during the 1960s; however, this effort was weakened because he had to defend himself against press attacks for being a socialist. Finally, the unique geopolitics of West Berlin, together with the anticommunist discourse, help to explain why the West Berlin department developed after 1968 into a (lonely) center of critical theory indebted to Marx and the Frankfurt School, and how these approaches were marginalized by the rest of the field and by the political system in the 1970s and 1980s.
