‘Leipzig – not the gate to the world as Hamburg is’, claimed the authors of a broadcast celebrating the millennium jubilee of Leipzig on Deutschlandradio in 2015. Their statement captured the common feeling in Leipzig, that it was not as famous as Paris or Hamburg, although the citizens of Leipzig have always been proud of their metropolitan traditions. This is true for Hamburg too: Both cities have frequently presented themselves as cosmopolitan, open to the world (Amenda/Grünen 2008; Rembold 2003a; Rembold 2003b). Therefore, both have been able to look back on a long tradition of highlighting their respective importance by stressing their global connections and declaring their specific locality as world territory, with responsibilities and privileges on a world scale. No wonder that both cities were constantly classified as open-minded metropolises in media discourses of the 1950s.

What we observe here is the communicative construction of space-related identities in mass media communication. Regarding the 1950s, our paper will focus on the on-going medial construction of space-related identities in Hamburg and Leipzig. Therefore, we ask how collective space-related identities were imagined, constructed and reconstructed, shaped and changed in a mediated communication process in the past. In particular, how were global reference points produced in mass media discourses? How were they connected to local characteristics? And how did they function as parts of changing processes of community building within the two cities?

Referring to Stuart Hall, we argue that people in Hamburg and Leipzig were confronted with multiple identities (Hall 1992): media communication in Hamburg and Leipzig in the 1950s comprehended different space-related identities – both in an interwoven and in a competitive way. Especially the local and the global closely interacted in the construction of particular urban space-related identities.

About the authors

Inge Marszolek
Until 30.9.2012, Prof. Dr. Inge Marszolek taught at the University of Bremen in the subjects of History and Cultural Studies. As a guest she worked at the International Institute for Holocaust Research (1999/2000) and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2001). She is a member “Communicative Figurations” research network.

Yvonne Robel
Dr. Yvonne Robel is postdoctoral research associate at the Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg. From 2013 to 2015, Yvonne Robel was a research associate in the subproject „Communicative Figurations of Media Discourses in Historical Change“ of the Creative Unit “Communicative Figurations” at the ZeMKI, University of Bremen. Prior to that, she had been a lecturer at the Department of History at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and research associate at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen. She received her doctorate in 2012 from the University of Bremen with a thesis on German politics of remembrance and discourses of genocide. Yvonne Robel studied Cultural Studies, Ethnology and Eastern-/South Eastern Europe Studies at the Universities of Leipzig and Halle (Saale). Since 2007, she has taught Cultural Studies and History.