When after World War II two German states came into being, both started out with rather identical media systems and audience expectations, while context and content quickly became defined by influences of the Cold War. In order to assess to what extent formats and genres of science communication and their reliance on specific media qualities were prone to political shaping, in particular concerning the more or less implicit messages science broadcasts should communicate, the paper compares a number of programmes and programme series both from radio and television. Science on the radio, on the one hand, was a fully established part of German broadcast culture, which had developed to high levels already in the middle of the 1920s with a huge educational agenda. After the war, this well-tried machinery became the means of some battles of programmes between radio stations, e.g. of West and East Berlin, presenting almost simultaneously two series of talks on atomic energy and peace. Television, on the other hand, was in the early 1950s just about to start, thus no common preconditions existed; nonetheless, German television and with it science broadcasts emerged in a way of mutual observance. In the case of television, the growing divergence of the uses of the specific media qualities with respect to science communication by East and West-German broadcasters can be exhibited in two examples. The West-German 'television professor' Heinz Haber, who had learned his trade with Walt Disney in the US, developed a rather unique West-German approach, while with the society URANIA, which became the central institution for popular science in East Germany and which copied various elements of similar Soviet organizations, socialist interpretations of the aims of popular science led to different uses of the qualities of the medium.