Panorama

Every evening the sandman is there when children prepare for bed. The wise child-like sprite with the goatee and pointed cap is also a prime example of East-West German media history. He was first seen on East German television at the end of 1959.

The Sandman is a child of the Cold War, his first appearance having been a surprising pre-emptive strike by the German Democratic Republic. There, at the beginning of November 1959, the head of programming for the GRD’s German Television, Walter Heynowski, learned of the plan of Radio Free Berlin (SFB) to broadcast a daily good-night program named The Sandman. Heynowski suspected a deliberate provocation by the enemy station, designed to torpedo the GRD series Abendgruß.

The SFB’s war for the nursery showed, wrote Heynowski to his director, “that our program also went down well with West Berlin children and their parents”. “Large political effects and emotions”, he continued, are bound up with this. And: “The opposing party’s intention of taking viewers away from us” should not be underestimated.

Goatee instead of full beard

The first episodes of the Western series, using a hand puppet, had long been in the can. German Television had hurriedly to upgrade its program. In a cloak-and-dagger operation, it developed a puppet with a distinctive goatee and pointed cap that would throw sand in the eyes not only of socialist youth but also of children in the Federal Republic.

The makers of the program at the broadcast center in Berlin-Adlershof needed only three weeks to produce the first episode, which was shot with expensive stop-motion special effects. On November 22, 1959, at 6:55 pm, Our Sandman (Unser Sandmännchen went on the air on GDR television – a full week ahead of his full-bearded rival at SFB.

“Oh my nose!”

The GDR rush job is as yet a fairly languid spectacle: it ends with the night-capped hero himself falling asleep in the snow-covered street. This prompted letters from several children offering him their beds, while grandmothers wanted to knit him warmer clothing. So as to make such offers superfluous, the Sandman was soon made better rested and given big round eyes and a new pointed cap. It was the beginning of an unprecedented television career.

As the framing figure for Mr. Fox and Mrs. Magpie, Hoppel and Mautz, Pittiplatsch and Schnatterlinchen, Plumps and the Chick, the Sandman developed into the most popular character on East German television. Plittiplatsch’s cry “Oh my nose!” became a common exclamation and the challenging Sandman theme-song composed by Wolfgang Richter, with its counterpoint and dissolving dissonances, became the GDR’s secret national anthem.

The Sandman shock

Like the 1950s race in space between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A., the final spurt to be first with the Sandman was also a bitter defeat for the West. Nor was this state of affairs altered when, in 1962, after West German television stations had made several false starts, North German Broadcasting (NDR) gave the figure a complete overhaul.

The German Television also saw things in this way – and not only repeatedly sent its puppet into film universe in a rocket model to commemorate the Communist double victory, but also into the real universe with East German cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn. Thus the Sandman became, along with Jähn, the first German in outer space. In the film comedy Good bye, Lenin, original footage of the event recalls this great moment in 2003.

Unrestricted exit permit

On earth, the East German Sandman could throw his narcotic in the eyes of children all over the world – except in 1974, the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GDR, so as to avoid an ambiguous “political symbolism” in the visualized idiom (“throw sand in the eyes”), as the script of the episode comments with over-wary ideological correctness.

Altogether, the Sandman was a constant defector with an unrestricted exist permit. He was allowed to go not only to Young Pioneer camps, to the National People’s Army, to the Leipzig Fair and to the official GDR holiday destinations of Hungary and the Soviet Union, but also to Japan, Lapland and Africa. He repeatedly traveled to fabled West Germany, to the Bremen Town Musicians, for instance, and to the Seven Swabians.

In the jeep of the class enemy

Having originated in the literary fairy-tale (E.T.A. Hoffmann and Hans Christian Andersen), the Sandman constantly boarded various vehicles to travel towards a progressivist, socialist future of the “Workers’ and Farmers’ State”. Whether in a horse-drawn carriage or on a combine harvester, street car or cement car, fashionable Trabbi convertible or the class enemy’s Land Rover, the dream figure invariably came to his viewers in elaborately wrought high-tech inventions.

Other means of transport used by the Sandman include back-pack booster rockets, a revolutionary waste bin emptying machine and a dolphin airship constructed according to “secret plans”, which hovered over a model of the newly re-built Alexanderplatz in a 1974 episode. There were over 200 vehicles altogether. A 1961 episode that took place on the Baltic Sea with a sailboat had to be re-shot: after the building of the Wall, free travel on the “wet border” of the open sea was prohibited.

What remains of East Germany

For nearly thirty years the East and West German Sandmen cruised the airwaves over a divided Germany in peaceful co-existence. Only after the fall of the Wall in 1989 was the turf in dreamland re-allocated.

The citizens of the GDR were glad to give up the East German mark and Spreewald pickles, but not their cult figure. When rumors were bruited about that Our Sandman was to be switched off along with German Television, there was a storm of protest. A “Sandman community of interest” collected thousands of signatures; parents in the new federal states took to the streets on behalf of their children. “If you are going to fail with any man in this country”, a journalist warned the new commissioners for broadcasting, “then it is the Sandman!” The West German media watchdogs probably never dreamed that they could trigger such a popular uprising.

The reunification was not to founder because of the GDR Sandman. Instead of him, his Western colleague was sent into retirement. Now, every day at 6:55 pm, Our Sandman brings over a million children throughout Germany to bed.