ABSTRACT
German Democratic Republic (GDR) retains a significant continued media presence for adults and children in literature, film, television, and Internet sites. Based on literature and films adapted for teaching GDR history for adolescents, the present research analyzes the process of remediation and 'sociological propaganda', treating the school as a site for convergence culture, and thereby highlighting tensions between popular sentimentality and sober reckonings with the repressive past of the GDR as a police state. Ludwig Marcuse's statement from his manifest essay on the affirmative character of culture anticipates aspects of Ellul's ideas about propaganda. Jacques Elluls's distinction of sociological and political propaganda runs into conflicts: official versions of GDR history emerge while a carnivalesque mixture of family nostalgia and popular fascination dominate the popular books and films. Cultural memory provides a corollary and complement to Ellul's notion that sociological propaganda lays the groundwork for political propaganda.
