With the heart in it
With the heart it was a Saturday night show of the television of the GDR . The 8 episodes between 1964 and 1968 were moderated by Hans-Georg Ponesky .
Emergence
The broadcast had its television premiere on October 7, 1964, the 15th anniversary of the founding of the GDR ( Republic Day ). The format was launched on January 18, 1964 as a radio broadcast. It ran on Saturday afternoon for over two hours on radio DDR 1 .
concept
The central point of the program was that in every program, working people were surprised by the moderator with mostly very elaborate actions. The participants' secret wishes had previously been discovered in their surroundings. (The later West German Rudi Carrell Show Let you surprise is based on a similar idea .) There were also musical performances by popular artists. Actions implemented were, for example:
- A married couple from the audience are sent home and find their apartment completely renovated.
- A traffic policewoman is picked up from her place of work and escorted to the stage, where she meets a Polish boy whom she had taken in after the war and had not seen for years.
- A couple is given a Trabant 601 , which they then fly together in a transport helicopter to a vacation spot.
- A railroad worker who lies in bed after a long shift is driven through Karl-Marx-Allee to the event in the Friedrichstadtpalast with a motorized bed that is in front of his door .
The program on April 16, 1966 had a major political dimension. There, on the show stage, a public reconciliation took place between Walter Ulbricht and Max Fechner , the GDR's first justice minister, who was temporarily imprisoned.
The second broadcast fell on Christmas Day 1964, which was also ideal, and another episode ran on April 16, 1965 on the upcoming 20th anniversary of the liberation from fascism.
On October 7, 1965, the program ran four times over the entire day for about an hour each time. Live broadcasts took place from different parts of the republic. For example, from an express train, from a mine near Zwickau and from Eisenhüttenstadt, where a Trabi convoy of pensioners drove for a walk.
rating
The historian Stefan Wolle describes the program as a TV version of the utopia of the "socialist human community" and continues:
“In retrospect, one can say that this television program was an anticipation of developments in the history of media that only made the brave new television world happy thirty years later. As a live broadcast of a mass event, 'With the Heart' was a kind of reality show with games, music, prominent guests and a large audience. The boundaries between medium and reality disappeared. The television broadcast was a reality and it was broadcast live on television. The master of ceremonies was an entertainer named Hans-Georg Ponesky, whose trademarks were his eternal smeary grin and his unctuous voice. "
literature
- Stefan Wolle “The GDR - A History from Foundation to Fall” , Bonn, 2015, p. 180.