Oldal 414 [414]
OCR
412 Christoph Lorke cooperation between the Ministries of the Interior, the judiciary, and media professionals could be observed. Ihe result was an increasing amount of legal propaganda: in daily newspapers, 3,000 to 4,000 law reports were published per year. Audio broadcasts and television detective shows completed those efforts (Helwig 1985: 144). ‘The role of the media was to establish and transmit a consistent image of unworthy, lazy, and uncultivated antisocial individuals. The perpetrators presented in the media possessed only limited verbal skills, and they had certain job profiles that situated the characters at the lowest rung of the social structure. Backgrounds and motivations that could lead to juvenile delinquency were outlined frequenty: broken families, bad role models, and an ethos and morality of “non-socialist origin”. Moreover, the overconsumption of alcohol played a key role in the construction of social otherness. The pub as a meeting point or bacchanalian house parties symbolized undisciplined, unrestrained behaviour (Korzilius 2005; Lindenberger 2008; for social dissent in GDR detective series, see Lorke 2017). The presence of social “parasites” has also been a very important feature of the Soviet and Bulgarian media landscape since the 1960s. In press articles, social and juridical documentaries, or crime movies, hooligans Auliganstvo (hooliganism’), tunejadstwo (‘social scroungers’) or other forms of “antisocial” behaviour patterns allegorized ex negativo socially undesired and inacceptable conduct (Ustinov & Gledov 1973; Hofmann 2016; Miteva & Giurova 1987). While the textual descriptions of these forms of social otherness were strikingly similar, the “other side” was visually almost absent. Thus, it can be stated that certain “filthy rites” (Greenblatt 1990: 59-79) were, on the one hand, the permanent presence of the “social outsider”, who represented individual violations of the “socialist norm” and, on the other hand, were to be kept more or less hidden from the public sphere. Presumably, this contrast was intended to illustrate and subsequently mobilize the audience to believe that crime and social problems are societal atavisms, exceptions, and absolutely “foreign” to socialist nature. Conclusion Even in the “advanced socialist societies”, noteworthy forms of marginalized groups tended to survive. They were closely associated with their work and with the rung (and the possibility to take part) in the process of social production and reproduction. In addition to the entertainment aspect of mass media, they also contained meaningful symbolic material. From the perspective of the state and party leaders they had to fulfil a “social mission” by communicating shared socialist values, norms, and habits. Based on the aforementioned observations, the constant circulation of certain social images in mass media was as a “transmission belt” and thus could be regarded as a microcosm of the production and reproduction of social inequality. Identity-forming images like those described in this chapter symbolized the “ideal” and politically desired social order. Mass media communicated the preferred patterns of individual behaviour and functioned as socially authoritative
