Television | ARD: Once upon a time it was nice

From today's perspective, those were golden times: Until the introduction of private television in 1984, which was pushed by then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU), there were fortunately only three public television channels in the Federal Republic of Germany: the first channel, ARD, launched in 1950; the conservative second channel, ZDF, which began broadcasting in 1963; and the commercial-free third regional channels (nature documentaries, cabaret, "Dinner for One," "Telekolleg"!), which actually belonged to the ARD. Funding through license fees was intended to ensure the independence of the public broadcasters, as it meant they were not dependent on taxpayers' money.

While ZDF developed into a kind of semi-official CDU advertising channel (»Kennzeichen D«, »Aktenzeichen xy«, »ZDF-Magazin«), oriented itself early on towards the success of RTL and SAT.1 and joined the general trend towards trivialization and dumbing down with its sensationally popular kitsch productions (»Das Traumschiff«, »Die Schwarzwaldklinik«), the ARD remained largely committed to its mission of not only entertaining viewers but also offering sufficient »contributions to education, information and culture«. If you look today at the sometimes ridiculously sorted ARD media library, where in the same section (»Films«) you find famous film classics (most of which are only available in the unbearable German dubbed version) right next to rancid Degeto tearjerkers and it is not exactly easy to choose between »Schlagerparty – Das Beste XXXL« (»Dahoam is dahoam« (»Odenwald hautnah«) and a lot of trash (»Tierärztin Dr. Mertens« (»Reiterhof Wildenstein«)), you do not get the impression that the people in charge of the program remember this mission.

A quick flashback to 1980: The internet was still a distant future. There were no video recorders, no home computers, no streaming platforms, and no smartphones. Many people in the 3,000-person community where I grew up in West Germany still had to leave their houses and use a payphone to make a phone call. The most modern devices in my parents' household (born in 1924) were a color television and a moss-green rotary dial telephone.

The world was still somewhat orderly back then, sitting on the living room sofa with your parents in the evenings, and being forced to watch quiz shows on "Das Erste" (First Channel): for example, Robert Lembke's "cheerful profession guessing," a long-standing show titled "What am I?" Its cuddly host had two men and two women, who looked as if they'd been transported straight from a retirement home's bingo night to a TV studio, guess the professions of the invited guests: vacuum cleaner salesman, herbalist, investment fund manager. "Am I right in assuming that you're not involved in the production of a product?" It was one of the most popular entertainment programs on German television: apart from a brief interruption of two and a half years, it ran on ARD from 1955 to 1989. On Saturday evenings, the same channel thrilled television audiences with Rudi Carrell's "Am laufend Band", Joachim Fuchsberger's "Auf Los geht's los" or Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff's quiz show "Einer wird gewinnen".

Even back then, people wanted to keep quiet about the Nazi past. The fact that Robert Lembke and the ZDF "Dalli-Dalli" host Hans Rosenthal had very fortunately survived the Holocaust, while Kulenkampff and Fuchsberger had been deployed temporarily in the Soviet Union as Wehrmacht soldiers, was not discussed. Now, 30 to 40 years after the end of the war, they were all seen on the same television screen.

People were delighted when Kulenkampff, grandmaster of excessive broadcast time, smiled mischievously as he announced to viewers that the following shows would probably start a little later. People wondered what prize might be hidden this time behind the dice with a large question mark on it, which always passed the remaining contestant on the "conveyor belt" at the end of Carrell's show. "A vacuum cleaner, the iron, a coffee set, a... er... pair of skis... and the question mark!" And people chuckled with satisfaction when Lembke asked each of his guests, whose professions the "guessing team" was supposed to guess: "Which piglet would you like?"

Thanks to the international competition between capitalism ("market economy") and socialism, and the existence of the so-called Eastern Bloc, the West at that time was still compelled to guarantee its citizens a minimum of prosperity, cultural participation, and social welfare in order to prove to the world that it was the better and more just social model. Television programming was accordingly geared toward the inclinations of those who were called the "lower middle class": Dad went to work, while Mom took care of the house and looked after the children. In the evenings, people gathered in front of the screen to relax.

In "Tatort," one watched the popular TV detectives Veigl (in hat and tie) and Haferkamp (in trench coat and tie) investigate, and Schimanski (in his worn US Army field jacket), who said "shit" every five minutes, wrestling and being boorish. Since the late 1980s, a woman, Lena Odenthal, even entered the male-dominated field. In "Lindenstraße," the first German soap opera, which aired every Sunday from 1985 to 2020 and would become the country's longest-running television series, one shared the everyday lives of the Beimers, Zenkers, and Zieglers. Or one expressed outrage at the first kiss between two gay characters on German television, which occurred in 1990.

The ARD also served as a teaching institution for comedy for a time, bringing a modicum of wit and satire into the drab living room of the rather clumsy German. Thanks to Loriot and Evelyn Hamann, we met the Hoppenstedt family and Erwin Lindemann; thanks to "Ein Herz und eine Seele" (A Heart and a Soul), we gained a deep insight into the inner workings of post-war West Germans. In his sketch series "Fast wia im Richtig Leben" (Almost Like in Real Life) , Gerhard Polt analyzed the racist core and psychological deformities of the German middle class. Thanks to Gerd Dudenhöffer's "Familie Heinz Becker" (The Heinz Becker Family), we learned what made the average provincial bourgeois tick.

Information about world events was obtained from the evening "Tagesschau," and those seeking criticism of the ruling class's policies were well served by the left-wing social democratic magazine formats "Panorama" and "Monitor." It's not impossible that the grumpy old man of investigative journalism, Klaus Bednarz, who, as editor-in-chief of "Monitor" from 1983 to 2002, stoically reported on the filth of corporations and politicians, would today be accused of "left-wing extremism."

Those who found West German reality too much to bear could turn to children's programming: The "Augsburger Puppenkiste" (Augsburg Puppet Theater) broke new aesthetic ground. The series "Meister Eder und sein Pumuckl" (Meister Eder and his Pumuckl ) ensured that the bustling goblin could never again be imagined with any other voice than that of Hans Clarin, while the delightfully undidactic "Sesame Street," steeped in Anglo-American humor tradition, and the clever "Sendung mit der Maus" (Sendung with the Mouse) succeeded, since the early 1970s, in smothering knowledge transfer with wit and enjoyment. And no one in the population would ever have thought of calling the broadcasting company that "broadcast" these shows, sketches, children's programs, magazines, and series by its correct name: the "Association of Public Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany" (abbreviation: ARD).