The rise of television as a mass medium in the 1950s and 1960s took place in many European countries, East and West, at approximately the same time. The changes television brought were not only technological, but also societal, affecting most people’s daily lives. These changes included a rearrangement of living rooms placing the television set in the center and a corresponding readjustment and re-evaluation of public and private spheres. The parallels within Europe and across the Iron Curtain regarding the rapid spread of television towers and TV sets, program development, and other related aspects are at least as striking as the more familiar political and ideological differences.

Enthusiasm and anxieties in the face of the new mass medium could be found in both Western democratic and Eastern state socialist countries. Across the boundaries of the Iron Curtain, television was regarded as a symbol of modernity and popular welfare by those in power. Communists viewed the new medium as an opportunity to bring “culture” to every home and to demonstrate technical progress in the competition with the West, while party functionaries-much like politicians in the West-still had to learn how to present themselves on TV. Censorship was undoubtedly stronger and more encompassing in state socialist countries. Nonetheless, the examples of the “télékratie” in France or the many instances of censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany, especially in the 1960s, suggest that bipolar models that contrast the dictatorial East with the democratic West are no longer adequate. Moreover, the propaganda, technical rivalry, and (attempted) mutual media overtures to enemy populations in the context of the Cold War point to common features of a shared media culture. We need, therefore, to develop concepts that highlight the complex interdependence between East and West, their cooperation but also as their competition, mutual adoptions, imitations, and alienations.

Taking as a starting point not only a history of the mass media, but also the history of social communication structures including various kinds of actors, platforms, and communication channels, we look for evidence of how public spheres have changed. This approach allows us to broaden our perspective to include social and political changes in which media were central. We, therefore, insist that sociological models of public spheres can and should be applied both to East and West European societies. These models shed light on a society’s inner communicative functioning and allow us to understand the place of mass media within broader societal processes of communication.

In many countries, television shaped post-war national cultures in various ways, such as, for example, promoting the knowledge and use of national standard languages. One the one hand, much historiography describes television as being a surprisingly “national” mass medium. On the other hand, the post-war decades saw the emergence of transnational spheres of interaction such as the creation of “Eurovision” (1954) and its Eastern counterpart “Intervision” (1960), the exchange of programs within and between the two “blocs” , or the live broadcast of events like the celebration of Yuri Gagarin’s return from space on Red Square not just in the USSR, GDR or CSSR but also in countries like Sweden or the Netherlands. While there are a number of national television histories and a vast amount of literature on television from various disciplines, transnational historical surveys are few and do not always reflect the current state of research. New publications on historical or contemporary European television history only rarely include state socialist societies in their field of vision.

The conference aims to combine both national and transnational perspectives and will present papers from the fields of history, media and communication studies, and other disciplines. It departs from the observation that television is a very useful lens for understanding the post-war decades in Europe. Studying the history of television in a comparative way will help to paint a more nuanced picture of national societies and to reconsider as well as to overcome the East-West divide. It contributes to the reconstruction of a “divided” and “shared” European post-war history (geteilte Geschichte).