By Jo Groebel

Germany is considered to be a country of books, of deep thought, and of highbrow media. However, Germany has also become a country of DJs and daily soaps. In popular German culture music and TV series, blockbusters in the cinema and the tabloid press are just as important as in other countries – and as the highbrow culture of the poets, the theater and the opera.

Naturally enough there are also some characteristics that are peculiar to the media scene in Germany. These include the emphasis on federal sovereignty in cultural affairs and broadcasting and the dual existence of public and private media, something that cannot be taken for granted in other countries. As regards freedom of the press and speech, in international terms Germany comes off very well. There is pluralism with regard to opinion and information. The press is not in the hands of the government or political parties, but rather in that of societal players. For more than fifty years now the Freedom of the press and speech has been the common property of everyone and protected by the Constitution. Article 5 of the Basic Law expresses how the Constitution interprets the freedom of the press: “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. (...) There shall be no censorship.”

In general the structure of the German media can be explained by the specific conditions of recent German history. On the one hand the country has experienced extraordinarily troubled times over the past centuries. Many of the theories behind changes in society emerged in Germany or actually took place there. The Enlightenment, Communism, Modernism: All these upheavals, at intervals of less than 30 years – Democratization, the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and Second World War, the East- West conflict and the Cold War, the student revolts and reunification always had a media side to them, indeed would have been unimaginable without the mass media that had emerged in the 19th century. The idea of freedom of opinion and equal rights was disseminated through books and the daily press.