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Die Leipziger Journalistenausbildung in der Ära Ulbricht

Conventional wisdom portrays the University of Leipzig’s Faculty of Journalism, the GDR’s leading academic training centre for journalists, as a propaganda institute dominated by Stalinist hard-liners preaching unadulterated communism. This article instead advocates a double contextualisation. By considering the leeway available to functionaries, lecturers and students within the Faculty and its interdependency with other institutions such as the Stasi and the Agitation and Propaganda departments of the Central Committee of the SED, the article analyses the genesis of the cognitive control system that helped to form the thought patterns and behavioural routines subsequently required in journalists’ daily editorial work.