EVER SINCE THE THIRD REICH, the Germans' relationship to the media and any possible manipulation of information has been understandably tense. To this day, the skepticism of the Frankfurt School is still very influential. The criticisms of the “culture industry” that Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horckheimer voiced in Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectics of the Enlightenment, 1944), developed into the dominant paradigms of German media theory. Only Hans-Magnus Enzensberger qualified the indictment of the German left in 1970. He pointed out that the resistive autonomous art of the Frankfurt School, which was supposed to penetrate the manipulative smoke screen of industrial culture, was probably just as obscure as the industry it was trying to fight. Its highly elitist art thus simply duplicated the ideologically overdetermined mass culture, and did not offer the individual room for thought.

In the late 1980s, Siegfried Zielinski observed that the advent of video recorders, CD ROMs, laser discs, satellite and cable reception, and the Internet, rendered old projections of a uniform culture industry meaningless. However, he predicted that even more non-public retreats would be established in order to resist the control of the media. Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer's theory of the media provides a different viewpoint, for he maintains that any catastrophic spectacle that the media report, regardless of whether it is real or simulated, is a basic element of any society. He argues that these catastrophes simply adopt the function of former public rituals, such as public hangings.