Deutsche Welle

Origins

DW was inaugurated on May 3, 1953, with an address by German President Theodor Heuss as its first shortwave broadcast. The declared goal of DW was to improve Germany's strained relationship with other nations after the end of the World War II and to present a new, democratic Germany to the rest of the world. In 1954, DW began radio transmission in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese with broadcasts lasting five minutes each. In the following years, DW rapidly expanded its broadcast services aimed at the then-communist nations of Eastern Europe and added languages such as Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian, Serbian, and Croatian. In addition, the English-language service, previously broadcast only to North America, was expanded and could be heard in Australia, East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Similarly, the French-language service started broadcasting to Africa.

As the political voice of a free and democratic Germany, DW quickly grew into a major international broadcaster of “unbiased” news and competed successfully with the development of similar foreign radio services in Eastern Europe. In addition to its role as the voice of a Western democracy during the cold war, DW's main functions were to improve the negative image of Germany after World War II and to maintain the political quest for a German reunification among an international audience. DW's international broadcasts were designed specifically to counteract the censored messages of the communist media in Eastern Europe and to help people get a more balanced view of international affairs.

In 1960, DW became an independent public broadcasting service, which allowed the broadcaster to govern itself and operate free of governmental influence. Two years later, on June 7, 1962, [Page 399]DW formally joined the public broadcasting organization ARD (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlichrechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland—a joint organization of Germany's regional public broadcasters) as an independent, national broadcasting station. In 1963, DW also started its first television activities by sending abroad dubbed versions of German films and television broadcasts. During the next three decades, DW's television offerings were limited to the international distribution of these dubbed German programs and consequently did not reach large foreign audiences. In 1992, however, DW-TV was launched and began broadcasting six hours of German and English television programs globally via satellite. DW-TV began as RIAS-TV, a television station launched by the West Berlin broadcaster RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) in 1988 to broadcast Western views into East Germany. After German reunification in 1990, RIAS-TV was closed down and DW inherited its broadcast facilities, which were used to broadcast DW-TV's German and English television programs internationally. In July 1993, the programs were expanded to 16 hours, and Spanish was added as a third language. Since 1995, DW-TV has been broadcasting around the clock.

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