Few developments in the industrial era have had a greater impact on everyday social life than the explosion of the mass media and commercial entertainments, and none have exerted a more profound influence on the nature of modern politics. Nowhere in Europe were the tensions and controversies
surrounding the rise of mass culture more politically charged than in Germany-debates that played fatefully into the hands of the radical right. Corey Ross provides the first general account of the expansion of the mass media in Germany up to the Second World War, examining how the rise of film,
radio, recorded music, popular press, and advertising fitted into the wider development of social, political, and cultural life.
Spanning the period from the late nineteenth century to the Third Reich, Media and the Making of Modern Germany shows how the social impact and meaning of
'mass culture' were by no means straightforward or homogenizing, but rather changed under different political and economic circumstances. By locating the rapid expansion of communications media and commercial entertainments firmly within their broader social and political context, Ross sheds new
light on the relationship between mass media, social change, and political culture during this tumultuous period in German history.
Part 1. Introduction
Introduction
1. The Rise of the Mass Media: Modern Communications and Cultural Traditions in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Part 2. Taming Mass Culture: Strategies of Control and Reform
2. Reasserting Control: The Regulation
of Mass Culture
3. Attempting Reform: Legitimation, Education and Uplifting Tastes
Part 3. Mass Culture, Divided Audiences: Media, Entertainment and Social Change in the Weimar Republic
4. Technology and Purchasing Power: Media Availability and Audiences
5. Meeting Demand:
Consumer Preferences and Social Difference
6. Media Publics between Fragmentation and Integration
Part 4. Mass Media and Mass Politics from the Empire to the Weimar Republic
7. Propaganda and the Modern Public
8. Republicans, Radicals and the Battle of Images
Mass
Culture in the Third Reich: Propaganda, Entertainment and National Mobilization
9. Political Control and Commercial Concentration under the Nazis
10. Entertaining the National Community
11. The Media and the Second World War: From Integration to Disintegration
Conclusion
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Corey Ross is a Reader in Modern History, University of Birmingham, UK.
