Media resonance and conflicting memories: Historical event movies as conflict zone

Historical television and European memory of the Second World War

Television is characterized as a national as well as transnational medium (Bangert, 2014: 238). It gathers an audience that shares a particular national culture, history and language, but it also initiates encounters with international events and conflicts. This becomes even more important in the digital age. As Wulf Kansteiner (2014) emphasizes more generally as a significant trend within the ‘pervasive, self-reflexive memory landscape and mediascape’, ‘the linear media of the 1980s are rapidly reframed and displaced by interactive digital networks’ (p. 403). Indeed, concerning historical television, most public and private broadcasting stations allow access to their content online. With the help of apps and programming tools, the Internet makes possible watching broadcast worldwide (of course, depending on individual language skills). In this way, television not only produces a transnational audience by broadcasting international events within the framework of national television, but also transmits national events and memories to transnational audiences. In doing so, it generates spaces for debating conflicting perceptions of past and present. The medium’s specifics, its multi-layered, intertwined but also elliptical and asymmetrical programme structure, is therefore of crucial importance (Paget, 2013: 147).

When it comes to memory, national television remains a significant agent for communicating perceptions of the past. This becomes especially important when considering television not only as a mediator of cultural memories but of individual ones as well (Kligler-Vilenchik et al., 2014). Accordingly, historical event movies do not only reflect the past, but also reshape it, especially concerning national and transnational memories. In this context, and in particular within a European framework, the question of addressing and mediating conflicting memories becomes crucial (Assmann, 2007: 14; Van Der Laarse, 2013: 85).

Claus Leggewie’s (2011) conception of concentric circles of European memory copes with these various, sometimes conflicting and definitely diverse layers of European history. In his conceptualization, he suggests that the Holocaust as a ‘negative founding myth’ (p. 123) provides a comprehensive dimension because it interrelates experiences of the past with challenges of the present, such as xenophobia, migration politics and military engagement in global conflicts. Thus, the concentric circles of memory can be understood as additive layers that widen the experiential space of European history and its entanglement with Europe’s present diversity. An important aspect of this multi-layered experiential space is eastern Europe’s Communist past, which especially challenges the political entities’ desire for harmonization (Van Der Laarse, 2013: 74). Although harmonization of European societies and markets is a crucial economic strategy within the process of European unification, it ‘is not easy to carry over this principle into political fields as symbolic as European history’ (Leggewie, 2011: 127). Therefore, Leggewie explicitly notes that if ‘Europe has – or is developing – a collective memory, it is just as diverse as its nations and cultures’ (p. 128).

On European television screens, and especially in Germany, the Holocaust and the Second World War constitute a crucial and enduring topic. From the 1960s to the 1970s, national productions dominated public broadcasting in both Germanys, focusing mostly on national, although partly controversial, narratives (Classen, 1999; Schultz, 2012: 121–126). Then the popular TV series Holocaust (USA 1978, dir. Marvin Chomsky) introduced a global if not universal version of the historical events, for the first time exclusively focusing on the systematic persecution of Jews in the Second World War. During the 1990s, German television encountered several historical television series, presenting a mix of historical film footage, re-enactments and testimonies (Kansteiner, 2006; Keilbach, 2008; Schultz, 2012: 321–330). These productions, often produced to commemorate anniversaries of significant historical events, performed a multiple turn of perspective, first, by adopting the drama mode set by Holocaust and succeeding productions towards a more entertaining way of re-telling the past on television; second, by including personal memories and narratives; and third, closely related to the latter, by performing a shift from the dominant focus on the Holocaust to the suffering of ordinary Germans during the war. As Laurel Cohen-Pfister (2014) concludes,

While the Second World War has been depicted in German film and television throughout the decades, its representation has reflected evolving stages of working through the German past, the different identity politics of East and West Germany, and shifting generational perspectives. (p. 104)

This resulted in an increasing number of popular television docudramas following the millennium such as Speer und Er (Speer and Hitler: The Devil’s Architect, 2005, dir. Heinrich Beloer) and Die letzte Schlacht (The Last Battle, 2005, dir. Hans-Christoph Blumenberg) (Bangert, 2014; Cohen-Pfister, 2014; Cooke, 2008; Ebbrecht, 2007a, 2007b; Keilbach, 2007) as well as internationally successful cinema productions that re-evaluated crucial events from the German past such as Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2003, dir. Sönke Wortmann), Der Untergang (The Downfall, 2004, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel) and Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, 2005, dir. Marc Rothemund) (Ebbrecht, 2011; Elsaesser, 2014: 263–305; Hake, 2007, 2012; Schultz, 2012).

Generation War in particular succeeded earlier historical event movies produced by the same production company, teamWorx, which significantly shaped German historical television with its influential docudramas from 2006 through 2013 (Bangert, 2014; Cooke, 2008). ¹ Since 2001, teamWorx has produced a number of noteworthy historical television dramas based on central incidents from Germany’s twentieth-century history and has successfully shaped the public visual memory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as well as the old Federal Republic, unification, the Nazi past and the Second World War. With more than 12 million viewers, the two-part event movie Dresden (2006, dir. Roland Suso Richter), about the February 1945 British bombing raids on the German city at the end of the Second World War, became Germany’s most successful fictional television broadcast. In 2007, the three-part drama Die Flucht (March of Millions, 2006, dir. Kai Wessel), which portrayed German families from the Eastern territories that were expelled from their homes at the end of the war and had to escape from the Soviet Red Army, reached a similarly broad audience of 11 million viewers. Both event movies adopted a transnational and European angle to reframe German history that also affected the reception (Bangert, 2014: 238). Dresden, for instance, interrelated the melodramatic story of a young German nurse with that of a British pilot whose plane had crashed close to the city, thus personifying conflicting perspectives and corresponding national memories of the historic events in the European context (DW, 2006). For the producers, the appearance of British actors in the movie was crucial. British diplomats, however, criticized the ‘beautiful lingerie in Dresden in February 1945’ and the artificial and melodramatic love story inserted into the film (Harding, 2006).

The result of such narratives is a certain double addressing that illustrates an attempt to cope with German national history and simultaneously inscribe the narrative of German suffering into the broader context of European memory culture without provoking dispute about conflicting national memories. Therefore, the role of protagonists from other European countries is to expand the German context and serve as an external witness to the events, as well as to provide international readjustment of the changing perspective towards German suffering. Generation War shares with its predecessors the focus on war experiences and thus extensively relies not only on war film genre patterns, but also on particular narratives connected to it. Crisis, conflict and shattered self-perception are dominant elements in these television dramas, as are their attempts to harmonize conflicting and traumatic experiences of the past and feelings of guilt and to promote a new concept of a peaceful Europe with strong historical consciousness.

Docudrama, the extra-textual and resonance

As Generation War and its predecessors demonstrate, the genre of television docudrama provides an important context for analysing the resonance effects of such broadcasts. This genre seems to be sufficiently suitable for generating and mediating public memory debates by transforming television from a medium of information and representation into an active agent bridging diverse spheres: the realm of information and the historical imaginary, the factual and the fictional, the representation and the active intervention, the mediation and the triggering of memory processes. As Paget (2013) emphasizes, ‘Docudrama has acquired a raised level of importance in the current political and cultural ecology’ (p. 173). First, this is a result of its references to social, political and historical issues, but also of its context because it ‘does not exist in a vacuum but is found in a complicated social, political, and economic environment’ (Hoffer et al., 1985: 182). Therefore, docudrama not only represents social, political and historical reality, but also affects it interdependently. The reason for this specific social and political resonation is its particular form. Because docudrama is a composite of fact-based and dramatic elements that often results in an elliptical or porous narrative, it ‘functions importantly as argument’ (Lipkin, 1999: 68) and therefore actively intervenes in public debates and even provokes political controversies.

Television docudrama thereby performs the function of shaping and creating publicly shared images, narratives and perceptions of the past, but also of interconnecting the personal and public dimension of historical experience. It translates historical events into personal stories and thereby generates shared cultural memories. Furthermore, it intertwines (in a relational as well as entangling sense) different perspectives on the past so that historical television foremost fulfils the function of generating intergenerational dialogues about history within a national framework. However, in the context of increasing interdependence in terms of international co-productions, the mediation of transnational memories has also become an important aspect of television docudrama’s aesthetics and narration (Bangert, 2014; Cooke, 2008).

In recent years, historical docudrama on German public television transformed into a particular kind of ‘historical event-television’ (Ebbrecht, 2007b: 221) that is mainly based on dramatized reconstruction of historical events depicted through the eyes of ordinary citizens.

This form of historical event-television form has been described as follows:

These broadcasting events work with a kind of popular history-telling, and use aesthetic and dramatic methods intended to guarantee audience ratings. One key feature of this new history-television is the personalization and individualization of history. Oral history (interviews with so-called Zeitzeugen, or eyewitnesses) is today the basic principle of historical event-television. [. . .] This kind of personification is not only the effect of a general tendency in history on television, it is also the result of a specific interest in national history-telling, and is related to images of the history of ordinary people. [. . .] When the history of Nazism is told through these kinds of life stories, this representation mode can also result in the ‘fading out’ of personal guilt within the larger ideological context of the period of time depicted. (Ebbrecht, 2007a: 225)

Historical event-television is closely related to the mediation of intergenerational experiences, memories and perceptions of the past. In contrast to ‘classical’ docudramas that visibly mix historical footage, interviews with eyewitnesses, and re-enacted dramatization of the events, most historical event-television productions are, like Generation War, entirely dramatizations. However, I argue that such event movies, although not aligning footage from different origins, still correlate with the docudrama genre as described by Paget, Lipkin and others. Besides the fact that these television dramas, especially in the German context, exclusively focus on ‘ordinary citizens and their stories’ (Paget, 2011: 94–95) and often explicitly rely on testimonies and eyewitness accounts, they are always part of a broader programming framework that interrelates the dramatization (as a kind of re-enactment) to documentary elements (including interviews with witnesses or experts and archive footage). However, now both segments are separated and only intersect within the context of the programming flow. Often followed by documentaries on the same topic and generating extra-textual debates and discussions, the entire television schedule virtually transforms into an extended docudrama. Historical event-television plays a crucial role in this mix of fact and fiction, historical imagination and political actualization.

One important aspect of such historical television programming, especially regarding its resonating impact, is the fact that ‘television docudrama is often preceded and followed by interview and discussion programmes’. This refers to a central feature of the docudrama genre, which Paget (2011) describes as ‘extra-textual events’ (pp. 117–118) extending the broadcast into additional societal and media spheres. Such events include ‘continuity announcements, talk-show appearances and discussion programmes. Newspaper campaigns, both for and against, can also be counted as part of docudrama’s extra-textual’ (pp. 117–118). In this way, the programmes that precede and follow the broadcast, and which often also accompany its online screening, connect it with its reception in the public sphere. As a result, historical event movies often have ‘opened up a debate and released new consideration of a past repressed in the decades immediately following the Second World War’ (p. 275).

Correspondingly, as a television event intentionally highlighted and separated from the programme flow through a ‘multichannel marketing approach’ (Kapczynski, 2015: 121), extra-textual framing played a crucial role in the case of Generation War. Reports in the television channel’s daily news shows transformed the broadcast into an incident of national interest (Cohen-Pfister, 2014: 113). Each part of the mini-series was followed by a documentary addressing its historical background mainly based on eyewitness testimonies, thus authenticating the action-driven but melodramatic storyline. Following the broadcast of the first part of the series, a documentary provided ‘authentic’ biographies that were intended to frame the interwoven conflicts of the film. The documentary Eine andere Zeit: Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter – Die Dokumentation (A Different Time: Our Mothers, Our Fathers – The Documentary) depicted five Germans who lived during the war and experienced events similar to those of the film’s protagonists.

By focusing on Generation War as an example that consciously and effectively addresses controversial aspects of the German past within a transgenerational and transnational framework, I would like to illustrate how historical television sometimes intentionally, but often also accidentally, transforms into an agent of dispute that prepares a resonant ground for the public negotiation of memory conflicts. In the following discussion, I am especially interested in this public resonance of such programmes and its effect on European memory debates. Accordingly, I focus on the way Generation War actively generated, intentionally or accidentally, international public dispute about conflicting memories in the European context. I review how it contributed to activating debates over the continent’s past in relation to its contradictory circles of memory and the ongoing struggle over its history of war and destruction in light of current events.

Memory frames and resonance effects

March of Millions had already provoked such international controversies. Media from Germany’s eastern neighbour, Poland, especially perceived the event movie critically, particularly pointing to the fact that Germans were represented mainly as victims and not as active initiators of the war and perpetrators of war crimes. A similar international dispute was repeated in 2013, when Generation War was broadcast on ZDF, the second German public television channel. Due to its character as a historical event movie, it was able to address manifold audiences and offered various interpretative frames that connected to diverse social discourses and at least three different levels of interpretation and actualization: a generational frame, a war experience frame and a European memory frame. Those interpretative frames were partly intended and partly occurred inadvertently, and resulted in colliding perspectives: a nationally German perspective and a competing European perspective, the latter of which was mainly a Polish national perspective on European history. The result was an ambivalent mode of perception ranging from harmonious to conflicting narratives of the German/European past.

I start with one of the most activating frames Generation War as a television event proposed. The movie was not primarily intended to represent the past, although it aimed to present the war in a historically authentic, direct and even radical manner. Its main interest was in generating a nationwide intergenerational dialogue and therefore initiating a debate about German family histories, an approach that was mediated through a special website of the broadcasting station ZDF entitled ‘Memory of the Nation’ (Kapczynski, 2015: 121), but also backed by other media (Cohen-Pfister, 2014: 114). What was implicit in most of the predecessors, the reproduction of narrative elements from family conversations about the past, was now deliberately adopted and turned from a critical analytical model into an affirmative marketing tool. In fact, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the German audience to gather in front of the television screens and its website presented all relevant articles about Generation War under one common logo and headline. Among these articles was a joint interview with a former German soldier and one of the principal actors of the movie, Volker Bruch. The fictive alter ego, enacted by a virtual ‘grandson’ and the actual eyewitness, perform a staged intergenerational conversation. Accompanying the interview are two photographs, one a historical picture of the former soldier and one of the actor in his costume uniform, presenting them as lookalikes (Eisenhauer and Schaaf, 2013). ² Finally, the website also provided an online chat to generate and collect wartime memories from its readers and to trigger a virtual intergenerational dialogue about war experiences. Users could even upload historical documents (Baus, 2013). In this way, news media and their websites created a resonating extra-textual forum to extend and enlarge the intended intergenerational dialogue.

Intergenerational family conversations about the past offer important patterns of representation for contemporary historical event-television (Ebbrecht, 2007a: 49). Elements of these conversations even became a significant part of historical docudramas and event movies, among them, most importantly, the tendency to use highly distorted and often fragmented individual memories, exculpate grandparents and synchronize knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust with personal German experiences of the Third Reich (Ebbrecht, 2011: 73). Part of the latter is often an adaptation of Holocaust imagery into the context of German wartime suffering, as well as a clear, and historically inaccurate, distinction between Germans and ‘the Nazis’, which are conceptualized as an alien ‘other’. In a broader context, family conversations and their equivalents in popular culture tend towards displacing guilt within a complex arrangement of transnational European war experiences (Welzer, 2005).

Generation War marks a new shift in this conjunction of historical event-television with the framework of intergenerational family conversation, which, according to Harald Welzer et al. (2002), is an important medium for fabricating and preserving shared images of history (p. 10). This time the broadcast itself was intended to directly catalyse such conversations and serve as a collective audio-visual ‘family album’ that offers, in contrast to a knowledge-based encyclopaedia, emotionally significant references for the interpretation of the past (p. 10). Not only, like other historical dramas of its kind, is the narrative structure of Generation War based on patterns of family conversations, it was explicitly meant to provoke such dialogue. Similar to the family conversation, the movie had a predominantly synthesizing function (p. 20) within the national generational frame, harmonizing conflicting memories and perspectives in favour of a consensual interpretation following the broadcast. This was already predetermined by Generation War’s narrative. At the end – borrowing a known subject-position from Holocaust-related films – the remaining friends, all marked as ‘survivors’, meet again at their favourite pre-war hangout. Victims, perpetrators and bystanders are presented as equally shaped by trauma and loss and finally shake hands, anticipating a post-war peace that ignores their disparate individual and collective experiences during the war. According to producer Nico Hofmann, the effect of tackling the war in this manner should enable ‘“a transfer between generations” by touching personal feelings, reconstructing family connections and allowing his protagonists to act in the grey zone of the anti-heroic’ (Leick, 2013; see also Cohen-Pfister, 2014: 107). Several German media commentators expected that the broadcast would provoke painful conversations in German families. Even critical reviews of Generation War confirmed the success of implementing this intergenerational frame. On the one hand emphasizing the blind spots in the plot, especially concerning antisemitism and the Holocaust, the alternative newspaper taz on the other hand acknowledged that the broadcast automatically evoked family memories in the viewer’s mind (Feddersen, 2013). While Nico Hofmann later credited the fact that many families in Germany had dealt with their own family history as a significant success of the Generation War (Bylow, 2018), the ability of the broadcast to trigger an intergenerational dialogue about the past remained an ‘illusion’ for the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel because most of the war generation had already died (Wiehler, 2013). Nevertheless, Generation War was a reason enough for Tagesspiegel-journalist Stephan Wiehler to dedicate a whole article to the account of his family’s history.

Extra-textual events such as television talk shows were the main forum in which such mediated family conversations were performed. The prominent talk show host Günther Jauch even invited a paradigmatic German family to talk about the war on prime time. ³ But ‘in this staged and helpless family conversation’ (Thiel, 2013), the evoked ‘last chance’ for an encounter between the generations did not reach beyond commonplace statements that had often been heard before. This, however, was a result of the specific dynamics of this particular communication genre. The stories circulating in family conversations are told and retold especially because everyone already knows them (Welzer et al., 2002: 19). It is based on the fictive assumption that all family members refer to the same family archive that produces coherence and identity (p. 20). Eventually, the intention to initiate a nationwide intergenerational dialogue about the Second World War failed. A reason for this was the inability to trigger certain resonance effects among the audience. The implicit tendency to finally close the debate about the past precluded controversial negotiation. Despite some minor historiographical queries (Herbert, 2013), Generation War basically confirmed existing audience expectations. The close generic resemblance with its predecessors, furthermore, limited the scope of resonance. Most of the controversy about historical event television had already occurred in response to previous productions like Dresden and March of Millions.

These restrained resonance effects concerning the intended outcome of the broadcast in Germany, however, unclosed opportunities for unexpected resonance. Besides the generational dialogue, the producers claimed to represent the wartime experience of German soldiers during the Second World War more accurately than ever. Indeed, large parts of the television movie cover extended fighting, as well as shootings of civilians, the German struggle against ‘partisans’, the killings of Jews and other war crimes. The filmmakers therefore not only referred to their own parents’ wartime experiences as a motivation to produce the movie, but also described the making of the film, with its extensive production value, as a particular re-experience of the depicted events. Referring to the film crew’s work on location in Latvia, production designer Thomas Stammer described harsh weather conditions prevailing during the wintertime shooting of the film, with its extreme temperatures (Classen, 2014: 52), hereby symbolically re-enacting the war. According to Stammer (2013), the unpleasant sets directly corresponded with the intense atmosphere created in the film (p. 15). Such statements do not only claim the authenticity of the recreations but also emphasize on the one hand the immersive character of historical re-enactments, which Vanessa Agnew (2007) described as ‘history’s affective turn’. On the other hand, the intention to ‘simulate’ the war situation responds to an understanding of war as ‘embodied experience’ (McSorley, 2014).

Thereby, the broadcast also caused inadvertent but significant resonance regarding Germany’s present military engagement and provoked debates about current wars, superposing past experiences of violence and military action on present ones. This superposition can be traced on several levels that again connect the narrative of the film with extra-textual layers.

The first of these levels refers to the cinematic imaginary of war. Although intended to be an accurate and ‘authentic’ recreation of the battlefields, most of the war scenes in Generation War are much more influenced by other prominent war movies (Cohen-Pfister, 2014: 109). This includes, foremost, the latest prototype of a Second World War movie, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (USA 1998) and its televisual extension Band of Brothers (USA 2001). While the former mainly influenced the visual style of the German broadcast, the latter offered patterns for the fragmented and crisis-driven narration. However, this narrative, the war as experience of crisis and trauma, also owes much of its intensity to a different historical model. Large parts of the battles, especially when the protagonists of Generation War wander through the expanse of Russia or fight in closed woods with Polish partisans, clearly resemble classic Vietnam War films such as Apocalypse Now (USA 1979) and Platoon (USA 1986). Actually, director Kolditz had consulted during his research ‘even books about the Vietnam War in order to accurately portray the military events’ (Cohen-Pfister, 2014: 107–108). Thus, another war offers the imaginary with which to imagine the war of the grandparents.

The second level refers to the absence of any war experience among the third generation of Germans born after the war. It was worthwhile reporting that none of the three principal male actors had served in the Bundeswehr, Germany’s armed forces, and in an interview, the actors speak about their experiences in a military boot camp learning how to behave as soldiers. Furthermore, the production employed a military expert who trained the actors on how to move correctly in a combat zone (Schacht, 2013). Thus, the event movie not only attempted to re-enact the memories and experiences of the grandparent generation, but also created the experience of prosthetic memories of war and military conflicts for the younger generation. Television became a substitute for lacking military experience in a society founded on the principle of peace, a fundamental principle of German post-war politics based on the consequences of the Second World War. Only 2 years after compulsory conscription to the Bundeswehr was suspended and the German citizen army was finally retransformed into a professional armed forces, Generation War provoked debates about Germany’s current military involvement. Kia Vahland (2013) evoked in the introduction to a review of the broadcast in the Süddeutsche Zeitung the current war in Afghanistan with specific reference to the German inability to honour returning war veterans. Historian Jürgen Busche (2013) interpreted the characters of Generation War and their actions as embodiment of current war experiences in Afghanistan. Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s most influential weekly political magazines, explicitly related the broadcast to the 20th anniversary of the first active German participation in a military operation after the war, when the federal government headed by Chancellor Helmut Kohl sent German soldiers to Bosnia (Hoffmann et al., 2013: 21).

Thus, on a third level, Generation War provoked debates about the present handling of international conflicts and military obligations. Under the headline ‘The eternal trauma: the Germans and war’, Der Spiegel assembled articles referring to Germany’s military engagement after unification, Germany’s commemoration of the Holocaust and individual memories from the Second World War. On the one hand, war and Holocaust are interpreted as commitment to peace and avoidance of military actions – a specific German ‘culture of military reluctance’ (Hoffmann et al., 2013: 22) – and Generation War was intended to underline this commitment. On the other hand, the broadcast faced a society in which long-avoided terms like ‘war’ and ‘veterans’ and acknowledgement that soldiers are being killed in action in countries where the German military is presently involved had finally re-entered political debates. To this was added the slow acknowledgement of the disturbing fact that young Europeans had begun joining Islamist terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria.

Thus analysed within the context of the broadcast and additional extra-textual events and debates, Generation War became a resonant multi-layered docudramatic entanglement that interrelated past and present, the Holocaust and post-unification Germany, experiences of crisis and the ‘war on terror’. This entanglement is further framed by the European experience that connects conflicting memories of the wartime period and presents experiences of crisis and conflict (Leggewie, 2011: 135). Accordingly, a third frame can be added to the broadcast of Generation War that further extends its impact into the transnational arena.

As an international co-production, Generation War was not only regarded as an additional verification of the depicted events and thereby, as stated above, shot at the ‘real’ locations, but was also labelled a European project that depicted an important ‘European’ historic event from a German perspective within a transnational framework. Therefore, on a horizontal topographic level, in addition to the vertical generational and the topical military ones, Generation War has to be seen as an attempt to interrelate and thereby harmonize conflicting European memories. This is illustrated by the attempt to transfer the movie from a national television event into the European context. Accordingly, in an op-ed in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Martin Schulz, later president of the European Parliament, interpreted Generation War as a European film by intersecting the German family frame with a European perspective (Classen, 2014: 56). Schulz (2013) opens his comment by referring to his parents’ wedding picture taken from his personal family photo album. Then he blends the story of his father, a German soldier, into the plot of Generation War. In doing so, Schulz interrelates personal and national history, before he refers to the European Union as proper answer to the cruelties of war. Nevertheless, the ambivalent mode of the film – merging fact and fiction, melodrama and war film, German intergenerational dialogue and historiographical accuracy – created controversial resonance, especially in the European context because of the collision of unexpected conflicting memories.

Particularly in Poland, public opinion perceived Generation War’s attempt to create a definitive European version of wartime memory from a German point of view sceptically and even with open hostility. Partly within an increasingly nationalistic discourse, the production was interpreted as an example for ‘hostile’ German memory politics that victimized the perpetrators while emphasizing Polish collaboration (Urynowicz, 2014). The reason for this displeasure was the film’s depiction of Polish partisan groups as fundamentally anti-Semitic, thereby diminishing German anti-Semitic motivations in the course of the Holocaust and implying an even greater part taken by Polish participation and collaboration in the destruction of European Jewry (Krzemiński, 2013). This national as well as European controversy soon left the framework of popular television and transformed the event movie into an issue of political activism and debate. Not only angry reviews, articles and op-eds followed the screening of the film in Poland, but spontaneous as well as organized protests at the ZDF broadcast station in Warsaw made the mini-series a subject of polemics that intertwined political reservations vis-à-vis Germany’s current role in European crisis management; traditional anti-German resentments; and painful inner-Polish debates about collaboration, guilt and responsibility with the national myths of suffering and victimhood (Cohen-Pfister, 2014: 116). In doing so, Generation War implicitly resonated with the controversial Polish film Pokłosie (2012) about a Polish massacre of the Jewish population in a fictional rural village, a story based on the historical case of Jedwabne (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2015). Pokłosie, which partly provoked harsh and even hostile reactions in Poland, however, revealed the controversial and conflicting Polish perspectives on the Second World War, ranging from self-critical to revisionist positions. Other than Pokłosie, the German production stayed alienated from the Polish experience and therefore could not evoke positive responses. While Generation War was too close to the expectations of the German audience, it accentuated the fundamental difference between the German and the Polish national perception of the Second World War within the Polish reception context.

As a result, the television drama became an issue not only in the political and diplomatic sphere, but also generated, mediated and activated transnational debates about conflicting and competing memories of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and their roles and legacy in European politics. However, in their detailed reconstruction of the debates about the broadcast in Germany and Poland, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska and Carolin Piorun (2014) observed ‘national monologues’ rather than an international dialogue (p. 131).

After a legal dispute, a district court in Kraków decided in December 2018 that the German producers of the mini-series have to broadcast an apology on German and Polish television to Polish war veterans. In addition, they were ordered to pay compensation to a 94-year-old former member of the Armia Krajowa who saw himself disparaged by the fictional depiction, clearly indicating the repercussions of the broadcast that transformed from a mediated family conversation on the national level into a conflict zone of competing memories in the European arena. Thereby, the movie and its extra-textual events, as well as its political impact and historiographical function, became a news issue and provoked a transnational media event even after it was broadcast, thus meeting Paget’s (2011) assumption that such television broadcasts ‘alert audiences both to issues and their representation’ (p. 272; emphasis in the original).

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Generation War clearly shows the impact of historical event-television’s activating dimension and resonance effects alongside its representative function. By generating public debates and affecting national as well as transnational images of war and history, the series left the sphere of popular television and entered the world of political dispute and controversy, especially regarding social, political and memory conflicts. This political impact is a result of its particular resonant form and mode of address. As part of popular historical event-television, Generation War affected a broad audience and thereby created deep social impact on the personal and public levels. Because of its intertwining of fact and fiction, documentary warrant and emotional drama, its docudramatic form, especially when taking into consideration a broader context of programming and extra-textual events, provoked arguments and therefore mediated and shaped controversial issues. Especially due to its integration in a network of extra-textual events, such as news reports, documentaries and talk shows, it crossed the boundaries between drama and factual television and even transformed into an issue of political protest. In response to these extra-textual spheres, event movies such as Generation War can increase their political and social impact and generate debates and public disputes, as well as political campaigns and initiatives, especially when they refer to conflict- and crisis-driven narratives based on wartime experiences that rely on diverse frames of reference. In this process, the Internet as an extra-textual forum for docudramatic subjects becomes particularly important (Paget, 2011: 268).

In the case of Generation War, we could identify two different forms of resonance. While the intended intergenerational resonance in Germany was limited, inadvertent transnational resonance effects occurred in the Polish case. An explanation for that offers Rosa’s distinction into synchronic resonance, which describes a self-referred, closed and consonant relationship, in opposition to responsive resonance characterized by a more open, dialogic and (even) significantly conflicting relationship (Rosa, 2016: 283). While the harmonizing purpose of the intergenerational frame in Germany caused synchronic resonance, the reaction in Poland was, due to different historical narratives in both countries, more responsive. The difference between these narratives, however, was partly so irreconcilable that conflicting memories dominated and dialogue became impossible. In Germany, however, other controversial topics, such as contemporary war experiences, gained more public attention.

Historical event movies not only represent historical conflicts and present conflicting perceptions of the past, but they actively generate transgenerational and transnational encounters with the impact of past events on the present. Docudrama as an expanded form within the programming, and in particular because of the increasing importance of its extra-textual dimension, is especially suitable to be such a resonating forum for entangled memories. It mediates conflicting and competing memories and political perceptions that can lead to public dispute and political controversies even beyond its dramatic narrative and broadcast. Thereby, it virtually transforms into a televised space of resonance, in which different temporal layers respond to each other, interrelate, connect and collide.