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Transmitting Revolution: Radio, Rumor, And The 1953 East German Uprising, Michael Palmer Pulido

Dissertations (1934 -)

This project examines public opinion in the Dresden Region of the German Democratic Republic from the end of World War II through the summer of 1953. I argue that the Socialist Unity Party (SED) projected its legitimacy through an official public sphere by representing publicness to its citizenry. Through banners, the press, and choreographed public demonstrations, it aimed to create the appearance of popular support. Even more significantly, the SED used radio to ground its legitimacy in a burgeoning post-war internationalism that bound residents of the GDR in an imagined community of socialist nations under Stalin’s leadership. At the same …