It’s thus interesting on more than one level to find a promotional film from the mid 1970s showcasing VEB Fernsehgerätewerk Stassfurt (German, Anglophones will need to enable subtitle translation), the factory which produced televisions for East Germans. It provides a pretty comprehensive look at how a 1970s TV set was made, gives us a gateway into the East German consumer electronics business as a whole, and a chance to see how the East Germany preferred to see itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0xMK6UZBys //

The film is at pains to talk about the factory as a part of the idealised community of a socialist state, and we’re given a tour of the workers’ facilities to a backdrop of some choice pieces of music. References to the collective and some of the Communist apparatus abound, and finally we’re shown the factory’s Order of Karl Marx. As far as it goes then we Westerners finally get to see the lives of each genosse, but only through an authorised lens.

The TVs made at Stassfurt were sold under the RFT East German technology combine brand, and the factory continued in operation through the period of German re-unification. Given that many former East German businesses collapsed with the fall of the Wall, and that the European consumer electronics industry all but imploded in the period following the 1990s then, it’s something of a surprise to find that it survives today, albeit in a much reduced form. The plant is now owned by the German company TechniSat, and manufactures the latest-spec digital TVs. //

As a juxtaposition of how a communist TV factory saw itself, have a watch of a capitalist one doing a bit of self-promotion.
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/29/retrotechtacular-1950s-televisions-were-beasts/#more-287834