The Romanian Television (RTV) Program in German in the Context of the National Communist Regime’s Minority and Cultural Policies (1969-1985)
The Romanian Television (RTV) Program in German in the Context of the National Communist Regime’s Minority and Cultural Policies (1969-1985)

Summary/Abstract: Based on audio-visual and written archives of the Romanian Television (RTV) and on document- interviews with TV producers, this article analyzes the Program in German, broadcast by this public institution for the German “cohabiting nationality” between 1969 and 1985, in the context of the communist regime’s minority and cultural policies of that time. Scrutinizing the principal sections of the considered Program, the author observes that this one was massively used as an instrument of the communist propaganda, as a tool for elite manipulation and cultural reproduction. The RTV Program conceived for the German “cohabiting nationality” had, in fact, as main subject the economy and the so-called “communist great achievements,” because it was in fact used as a tribune for praising the regime, the Communist Party and Nicolae Ceauşescu. It serves also as a tool within the process of building the Romanian “socialist nation” – a new “imagined community,” denuded of references to the multiethnic past and exclusively based upon the common ground of ideology. Consequently, references to Germanness became an object of ideologization and censorship.

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