Katja Berg
Completed PhD project

Funded by the German research Foundation (DFG)

With the aid of the Luxembourgian programme provider RTL, the contribution of this commercial enterprise to the transformation of media cultures in West Germany and France will be comparatively examined. The project surveys the transition from a society of shortage to a consumer society, which shaped social and cultural history and was experienced by both societies during this time. This process was closely linked to the spread of audio-visual media and was decisively advanced by them. According to my working thesis, RTL played a pioneering role here in both countries as an exceedingly successful, commercially-orientated provider of radio programmes that avoided direct, nation-state attempts at regulation by virtue of its location in Luxembourg. At the three levels of strategies, programmes and perceptions – in each case for France and Germany – it will be considered how the provider profiled its radio programmes and how politics, media and society reacted. By concentrating on an important transnational actor, the project aims paradigmatically for a better understanding of the early phase of the transformation of media cultures in the transition to commercialised and liberalised publics in Europe.

Sub-project within the research project Radio Télévision Luxembourg (RTL) as a Transnational Programme Provider (1945–1985)​