Towards Prosperity and Peace: The Beginnings of the European Project in the West German Governmental PR Film Der erste Schritt

Abstract

Films that advertised the rising status of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as a partner in Western economic and military alliances were an integral item of the Adenauer administration’s PR arsenal. Produced through the state-funded newsreel system Deutsche Wochenschau under the direction of the Federal Press Office, these films provided an effective way to reach out to the electorate and explain and highlight the successes of democracy in a post-fascist country. PR films also emphasized the FRG’s role as an integral partner in the emerging European project. This article examines Der erste Schritt: Die Geschichte eines Briefes, a 1951 film advertising the Schuman Declaration as the necessary “first step” to overcome the socio-economic devastation of postwar Europe. The film reveals its producers’ agenda to manipulate the collective memory of the war-ridden Franco-German Erbfeindschaft and replace memories of animosities with images of pragmatic cooperation. Through a focus on the First World War as a tragic, but heroically fought confrontation between the nations, the film helps its audiences bridge the more recent and more conflicted Second World War past. The film’s narrative argues for a unified Europe by vividly describing its absence vis-à-vis the post-Second World War destruction in central Europe, and by drawing favourable comparisons with the large, unified economic territory of the United States. Compared to later PR films that accompanied Konrad Adenauer’s and Charles de Gaulle’s policy of reconciliation in the early sixties, Der erste Schritt in 1951 does not try to manufacture an image of friendship between the two countries. Instead, through the sentimental frame narrative of a letter by a young French woman to a West German politician, the film’s narrative insists that only economic cooperation, the abolition of inner-European borders, and the sharing of resources can lay the foundation for lasting peace and prosperity in a war-torn Europe. The article closes with an overview on how the film was used in PR deployments that advertised the European project. In sum, Der erste Schritt provides an important perspective on the Adenauer administration’s early imaginations of Europe, and how these images were put to work to further the FRG’s still ongoing process of consolidation during its founding years.