Project status: completed

Project Goal: Book Publication

Funded by: Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media

The research project “Engineers of the Statement” is funded by the research program launched in November 2016 to examine the Nazi past of ministries and central German authorities. It examines the practices of government press relations and the interactions with journalists during the period between 1949 and 1969. In this context, various competing bodies of knowledge regarding the shaping of and engagement with public opinion overlap. The goal is to delineate the lack of clear distinction between public relations, public outreach, and propaganda. The focus is on the Federal Chancellery as well as the Federal Government Press and Information Office, which was established in 1958 and headed until 1963 by the Hamburg-based journalist and screenwriter Felix von Eckhardt. The research project examines the knowledge resources of state information policy within the parliamentary-representative political system of the Federal Republic of Germany. These practices and bodies of knowledge were by no means implemented or transmitted after 1945 through a transfer from the Western Allies under occupation law. Rather, state public relations work in West Germany built upon existing bodies of knowledge regarding propaganda efforts and official statements by ministries and local governments, as they had developed during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi regime. This also touches on the orientations of the party press during the interwar period, as well as attempts at restructuring within the framework of the Allied licensing policy for publishers and media companies between 1945 and 1949.

Accordingly, we must assume that various relationships of exchange and reinforcement shaped past and contemporary understanding of the relationship between propaganda and public relations. Despite their complexity and their references to the journalistic experiences of the newspaper-based media society of the Weimar Republic, they also reveal connections to Nazi press control. *Engineers of the Announcement* thus examines the transformations and reshaping of the media landscape in the three Western zones and the Federal Republic of Germany, and investigates the interventions by media policy experts in the Federal Chancellery, into ad hoc interventions in the presentation and staging of political action, as well as into the reporting, commentary, and correction of classified and public information.

Publication:

Angela Schwarz/Heiner Stahl: Kontaktzone Bonn. The Federal Government’s Press and Information Office and State Public Relations, 1949–1969, Göttingen 2023

Lines of continuity in government communication policy and relations with the press in the early Federal Republic.
In the postwar period, the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Government Press and Information Office were staffed by men who could draw on a wide range of experience in government press and information work dating back to the era of the German Empire—from the German Empire through the Weimar Republic to the end of the Nazi regime. In particular, the experiences gained during the twelve years of dictatorship and its state control of the media were incorporated as a body of knowledge and proven practices into the reconstruction efforts beginning in 1949. Thus, in the young Federal Republic, efforts to engage with the press and the public did not immediately emerge in a way that took into account the conventions of a liberal and democratic constitutional state or the information needs of an open and critical media society. Rather, existing structures and key figures from the 1930s and early 1940s continued to exert influence. In their examination of the Office of the Federal Chancellor and the Federal Government’s Press and Information Office, Angela Schwarz and Heiner Stahl combine cultural and media-historical approaches with a history of the mindset underlying government public relations work.

Link to the publisher’s website: https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835353732-kontaktzone-bonn.html