State history on the radio. The production process and the intermedial transfer of regional historical narratives of the WDR regional editorial office around Walter Först (1960 - early 1990s)

• Applicant: Dr. Katrin Minner
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453963706

Using North Rhine-Westphalia as an example, the project analyses narratives of state history distributed by mass media between 1960 and the early 1990s and traces practices of "doing history". In a symbiosis of public history and media and state historical perspective, the intermedial transfer of historical contributions as building modules of historical culture will be examined exemplarily on the basis of the WDR-Hörfunk-Landesredaktion (WDR radio editorial office dealing with state affairs) around the journalistic NRW history expert Walter Först (1920-1993). The editorial team has actively produced and anchored formative historical images for North Rhine-Westphalia. On the basis of intensive archival research, it analyses how the journalistic actors located the state in the field of tension of a diverse region, the Federal Republic of Germany and its European neighbours and how they promoted historical processes of meaning and identity formation. It is examined how the editor-in-chief established a network with other institutions and persons working in the fields of politics, culture and history, transferred this into institutional forms beyond broadcasting and thus created an additional communication basis for negotiated narratives. During the first funding phase, there were delays in the review of the sources for external reasons, which led to delays in the further evaluation schedule. The aim of the requested extension is to be able to examine an important archive collection that has not yet been indexed and therefore cannot be used, and to continue and complete the analysis of the discourses from the corpus of broadcast manuscripts as quickly as possible in order to finalize the overall manuscript.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants