Vorspann
Die Universität Leipzig war das Zentrum der akademischen Journalistenausbildung in der DDR. Die Fakultät für Journalistik, umgangssprachlich auch „Rotes Kloster“ genannt, sollte die ostdeutschen Massenmedien mit ebenso gut ausgebildeten wie linientreuen Fachleuten versorgen, die geeignet waren, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Konsens zu stiften oder zu stärken. Die Autoren können zeigen, wie groß der Konformitätsdruck war, der auf den - nicht selten idealistischen - Studenten lastete, wie wichtig SED und Staatssicherheit das Thema Journalistenausbildung nahmen und wie komplex sich die politisch-sozialen Beziehungen gestalteten, in deren Zentrum die Fakultät für Journalistik stand.
Abstract
Immediately after its foundation, the University of Leipzig Faculty for Journalism developed into the central academic training centre for journalists in the GDR. However many aspects of its history have hardly been researched so far. To date, the faculty has mostly been described as a propaganda institute which trained by drill, with a squad of Stalinist hard-liners at its pinnacle who drummed the communist classics into the cadre of students. The present article, which concentrates on the early history of Leipzig journalism till the end of the 1960s, takes a different route: The authors advocate a double contextualisation which takes into account both the different degrees of leeway available to functionaries, lecturers and students within the walls of the faculty as well as considering their interdependency with other relevant institutions such as the Stasi and the Agitation and Propaganda departments of the Central Committee of the SED. In this way, the article analyses the genesis of the cognitive control system which contributed to the formation of the thought patterns and behaviour routines required in later daily editorial work. In accordance with the wishes of the SED to bring all communication in society under unified control, the primary goal of this form of education was the disciplining of the consciousness of future journalists.
© 2015 Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH, Rosenheimer Str. 145, 81671 München
