Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert ... Zur Karriere der Unterhaltung

Abstract

Bei der Einweihung von neuen Autobahnabschnitten oder High-Tech-Anlagen läßt man gelegentlich einige junge Frauen in historischer Tracht aufziehen - freundlich-nichtssagende Gegenpole zur jagenden Modernisierung, um die es eigentlich geht. Dem historischen Auftakt zu einer aktuellen Mediendiskussion mag eine ähnliche Funktion zugedacht sein. Aber der historische Part steht doch nicht unverbunden neben dem aktuellen: Unterhaltung ist durch ihre Geschichte mitdefiniert. (...)

English

"Once the reputation is ruined " On the career of entertainment.

The author reconstructs the assessments and valuations which the phenomenon "entertainment" has received from the Middle Ages to the present days. Entertainment used to be an easy and widely popular pleasure until the early modern age, when the new demands.for religious earnestness ("Christ did not laugh") started to debase "mere" entertainment. Later on, Puritan ideas of order and industriousness set "the serious side of life" against fun and entertainment in a similar way. The present day distinction between "high culture" and "popular culture", between "serious art" and "shallow entertainment" is also rooted in this tradition. A term like "light entertainment art" seems, therefore, almost like a contradiction in itself. Entertainment has long since borne the stigma of being unreliable and, in the end, in proper. The author describes this development as a character assassination of entertainment. Separations and devaluations, however, could not prevent that entertainment - produced in serial mechanical production within a short time - often developed an aesthetics of the unrestrained, the imaginative and of exceeding the Iimits, thus gaining and saving "a bit of freedom". By means of its separation entertainment also obtained new freedom and scope, which loosen the bonds of a rigid aesthetics and morality, release innovative potentials and engender new forms and genres. These newly created forms repeatedly renewand refresh the established forms which otherwise remain empty, dull an rigid.