Abschlussbericht des DFG-Projekts "Landesgeschichte im Radio. Der Herstellungsprozess und der intermediale Transfer von landesgeschichtlichen Narrativen der WDR-Landesredaktion um Walter Först (1960 – Anfang der 1990er Jahre)"

The final report of the DFG-funded project ‘State History on the Radio: The Production Process and the intermedial Transfer of Regional Historical Narratives by the WDR Regional Editorial Office under Walter Först (1960–early 1990s)’ briefly summarises the results of the historical research.
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.