Germany's constitution made room for Deutsche Welle by drawing a line at the border
In postwar West Germany broadcasting belonged to the individual states, a safeguard against government propaganda. So how could Bonn run its own station? A 1960 ruling split the difference: broadcasting into Germany stayed with the states, but broadcasting out to the world counted as foreign affairs. Deutsche Welle, the German Wave, grew from that loophole.
An earlier Deutsche Welle was founded in Berlin in 1924 by diplomat and radio pioneer Ernst Ludwig Voss and began regular broadcasts in January 1926; it was absorbed into another company in 1933. The modern station went on air on 3 May 1953 with a shortwave address by West German President Theodor Heuss. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer backed a federal international broadcaster, though the Constitutional Court blocked his wider plan for a federal television channel. Deutsche Welle became an independent public body in 1960 and joined the ARD network of public broadcasters in 1962.
Reunification reshaped it. East Germany's international service, Radio Berlin International, disappeared in 1990, and some of its staff, frequencies and transmitters passed to Deutsche Welle. Television came via an unusual inheritance: RIAS-TV, launched in West Berlin in 1988 by the American-sector broadcaster RIAS, became redundant after the Wall fell, and on 1 April 1992 Deutsche Welle used its facilities to start a satellite channel in German and English. It went round the clock in 1995.
It was also an early adopter online. In September 1994 it became the first German public broadcaster with a website, though for two years the site offered little beyond contact addresses. After trying several addresses, it finally bought dw.com from a software company in 2013, having failed to claim it in 2000, and moved there in 2015 alongside the launch of a 24-hour English news channel branded DW News.
Unlike Germany's other public broadcasters, which are financed by a household licence fee, Deutsche Welle is paid for from federal tax revenue, with a 2016 budget of 301.8 million euros, and carries little or no advertising. A 2003 law made its website an equal partner to radio and TV, and it now works in 33 languages from bases in Bonn and Berlin, with over 4,000 people of more than 140 nationalities.
Source: Deutsche Welle
