The Treuhandanstalt and the Privatization of the GDR Press

• Applicant: Mandy Tröger, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 502216302

The research project "The Treuhandanstalt and the Privatization of the GDR Press" examines the Treuhand policy with a focus on newspaper privatizations in East Germany in the 1990s.The study examines the long-term consequences of these privatizations for the press landscape in East Germany. The period under investigation extends from November 1989 to the legal settlement between the Treuhandanstalt (THA) and the SED's successor party, the PDS, in July 1995. This period was interspersed with the sale of former SED district newspapers (SED-Bezirkszeitungen) in April 1991, the release of the former central organ Neues Deutschland (ND) from THA administration in October 1991, and the liquidation or sale of former bloc party newspapers (Blockparteizeitungen). The project aims to show how the THA's different frames of action in the privatization of these GDR press organs played out. To date, there has been no comprehensive, historically detailed and file-based research, stocktaking and/or reappraisal of the history of the THA in the press sector that would allow a scholarly analysis of the development of the press landscape in East Germany after 1990. Also the claims for restitution made by political parties in the press sector have so far fallen completely outside the scope of historical research. The aim of the project is to fill these historical and scholarly gaps.The project examines how the THA drove structuring processes in the East German press landscape, what goals it pursued, and what the final outcomes were. The focus lies on individual actors and structural contexts, possible intra- and inter-institutional conflicts as well as internal communication processes and external communication strategies. This is accompanied by a search for transformation perspectives and structural alternatives, i.e. for media policy visions and initiatives in the early 1990s, to make them fruitful for current problems. Through this work, historically critical research, which is hardly represented in the field of media and/or communication studies in Germany, should once again gain more relevance. For the media present cannot be analyzed comprehensively without its historical developments.The results of this project will be published in a monograph (as part of my academic qualification) and in German- and English-language peer-reviewed journals. The aim is to provide a differentiated analysis of the THA policy in the press sector that ties in with current discussions about press freedom in East Germany and approaches these discussions in a fact-based and multi-perspective manner.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position