Aktuelle Kamera

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"Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren, zur Aktuellen Kamera. — Die Übersicht..." - Aktuelle Kamera's opening (English: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, it's Current Camera — The Headlines...)

Aktuelle Kamera
Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren, zur Aktuellen Kamera. — Die Übersicht...
Genre	News program
Creator(s)	None
Starring	Herbert Köfer Klaus Feldmann Elisabeth Süncksen Hans-Dieter Lange Angelika Unterlauf Wolfgang Meyer Wolfgang Lippe Matthias Schliesing Renate Krawielicki Anne-Rose Neumann Peter Kessel Christel Kern Klaus Ackermann Heidrun Schulz
Country of origin	East Germany
No. of episodes	over 12,000
Production
Running time	0:30 minutes (per episode)
Broadcast
Original channel	Fernsehen der DDR
Original run	December 21, 1952 – December 14, 1990

Aktuelle Kamera (in English roughly translated as Current Camera) was the state television newscast of the former German Democratic Republic (German: Deutscher Fernsehfunk, known as "Fernsehen der DDR" between February 11, 1972 and March 14, 1990). On air from December 21, 1952 (daily broadcasts were not until October 11, 1957, however) to December 14, 1990, Aktuelle Kamera was one of the main propaganda tools of the East German government.

Contents 1 Editorial line 2 Schedule 3 Popularity 4 Coverage during the last days of GDR 5 Program's fate after GDR 6 In popular culture 7 Hosts 8 References

[edit] Editorial line

The newsroom of Aktuelle Kamera was directly linked to the Politbüro of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany's Central Committee. The programme presented reports that promoted socialism and portrayed the West in a negative manner. The programme also had a pro-government bias and typically did not report on news that could be seen as fuelling anti-government sentiment.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Schedule

Aktuelle Kamera's main edition was originally scheduled at 20:00 before being moved to 19:30 in the 1960s, so as not to coincide with the major West German newscasts, ZDF's "heute" at 19:00 and the ARD's tagesschau at 20:00, both of which were widely watched in East Germany. The broadcast lasted 20 minutes until 1972 when it was expanded to a full half-hour.

Starting in the mid-1970s, another 30-minute edition was presented on DDR2 (launched in 1969) around 21:30. Prior to that, both channels aired Aktuelle Kamera simultaneously at 19:30. AK 19:30 was also entirely repeated the next morning when DDR1 opened around 9:30 (later 8:30), before airing school-oriented programming.

News summaries were added as the transmissions increased during the day. There was a bulletin at the end of the morning programmes (i.e between 12:00 and 13:00) and another at 17:00 on the first channel. DDR2's evening schedule always began with the news at 18:45 (later 17:45 and 18:55). Late newscasts did not appear until the 1970s, when DDR1 screened a headline update following magazines around 22:00. From the 1980s, Aktuelle Kamera's final round-up was the last programme at the end of the day.

[edit] Popularity

In fact, television audiences largely ignored Aktuelle Kamera, as West German television was preferred (accounting for 10-15% of actual viewing).^{[citation needed]} The East German authorities were well-aware of this, and went as far as adopting the French color standard SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in the Federal Republic of Germany. This move did not hinder reception of West German TV as such, as the basic television standard remained the same. It did however prevent reception in colour by native East German TV sets. However, the majority of East German sets could not normally display in colour.^{[citation needed]}

However, East Germans responded by buying PAL decoders for their SECAM TV sets. Eventually, the government in East Berlin stopped paying attention to so-called "Republikflucht via Fernsehen", or "defection via television".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Coverage during the last days of GDR

Almost a month before the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Aktuelle Kamera loosened its fidelity to the party line and began presenting fair reports about the events transforming East Germany at the time. On October 16, 1989, it showed its first pictures of the massive opposition rallies taking place every Monday in Leipzig.

[edit] Program's fate after GDR

Following the end of the GDR, the many editions of Aktuelle Kamera were rebranded according to the period of the day they aired. The 12:50 newscast was from then known as AK am Mittag ("AK at Midday"), the main broadcast of 19:30 Aktuelle Kamera am Abend ("Aktuelle Kamera Evening") and the news on DDR2 AK-Zwo. News summaries received the generic name of AK-Nachrichten (simply "AK-News") or AK-Kurznachrichten.

The last newscast under the name Aktuelle Kamera was presented by Petra Kusch-Lück on December 14, 1990 at 1:00 on DFF1 (ex-DDR1). From the next day and until December 31, 1991, DFF news was re-titled Aktuell. East German television was restricted to one channel, after DFF1 was shut down to transmit Das Erste. On January 1, 1992, the former DDR2 was regionalised and incorporated into the ARD as the regional channel ("Dritte Programme") for the "New Länder" under the names of MDR-Fernsehen (Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen), ORB-Fernsehen (Brandenburg, later merged with Sender Freies Berlin to form Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg) and N3 (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern).

[edit] In popular culture

The 2003 film Good Bye Lenin!, about a woman who falls into a coma before the Berlin Wall comes down and does not emerge until several months hence, features Aktuelle Kamera as a plot point. The film deals with how her children create a "DDR in her bedroom", doing such things as putting food in old jars, wearing old clothes--and showing AK tapes heavily. One of the first things protagonist Alex's friend Denis does is get tapes of old East German shows: "about 30 Aktuelle Kamera, 11 Der schwarze Kanal, six of that variety show you mentioned, and three or four of Everyday Life in the West." When Alex said that his mother would notice that the news was old, his friend replied that "they're all the same old crap, anyway." Denis, an amateur filmmaker, even goes as far to produce fake newscasts that say that West Germans were streaming into the DDR to avoid neo-Nazi groups and unemployment, not the other way round.

[edit] Hosts

Aktuelle Kamera's principal presenters, 1952–1990:

• Herbert Köfer
• Klaus Feldmann
• Elisabeth Süncksen
• Hans-Dieter Lange
• Angelika Unterlauf
• Wolfgang Meyer
• Wolfgang Lippe
• Matthias Schliesing
• Renate Krawielicki
• Anne-Rose Neumann
• Peter Kessel
• Christel Kern
• Klaus Ackermann
• Heidrun Schulz

[edit] References

• http://www.ddr-tv.de.vu
• http://www.mdr.de/damals-in-der-ddr/lexikon/1516374-hintergrund-1601149.html