Why It Matters

This last chapter follows one thread through the whole course: how German film and television have dealt with the Nazi years and, later, with the East German state. German has a long word for the process, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, usually translated as "coming to terms with the past", and a shorter one, Aufarbeitung, "working through". The chapter draws on the earlier ones, asks how the approach changed over time and what it tells us, and ends with suggestions for further reading and viewing. As in the rest of the course, it separates what can be checked from reputation and memory, and the exercises ask you to do the same. Recent events end with the 2026 cut-off.

Stages of Looking Back

Silence, Then Argument

The pattern across the first two decades is that the screen, like society, looked away. The rubble films did look at the problem (Chapter 4), but their audience was small. The 1950s preferred romance, villages and soldiers who were presented as ordinary victims. It was left to the generation born in or just after the war to ask their parents' generation what it had done, and the film-makers of the Oberhausen Manifesto and of New German Cinema (Chapter 6) took up the question in their own ways, often through stories about families and political violence.

A Turning Point

In January 1979 an American television series on the Holocaust was shown on West German television, and the response was very large (check). It is often described as the moment when the subject entered the living rooms of ordinary families. Edgar Reitz is reported to have felt that Germans should tell the story of the period in their own way, and Heimat (1984) was his answer (Chapter 8). Whatever the exact chain of cause and effect, the later 1980s and 1990s brought a steady flow of documentaries, dramas and discussion programmes on public television.

Directly and by Indirection

• Directly. After 2000 a series of dramas dealt openly with the period. Downfall (2004), about the last days of Hitler, divided critics over whether showing him as a human being was wise or dangerous; Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) told the story of a young woman in the resistance (check the titles and years). A later satire, Look Who's Back (2015), imagined Hitler returning to present-day Germany (check). The television drama Generation War (2013) provoked protests abroad (Chapter 8).
• By indirection. Many works were about the consequences of the past without showing it: families who did not speak, villages with unspoken histories, political violence in the 1970s, and the way the postwar economic recovery was built on silence.
• By restriction. Some propaganda films from the Nazi years remain restricted, shown only in special settings with an introduction (Chapter 3; check how this works now), a different way of handling the past that has its own supporters and critics.

The Second Past: the East

After 1990 the question had a second part. East German film and television had been controlled by the state (Chapters 5 and 7), films had been banned, and the secret police had watched everyone. Films released after the end of the state, such as banned films from 1965, and new films, such as The Lives of Others (Chapter 9), made the East a subject of its own. The danger on the other side was nostalgia, or "Ostalgie", which could make a dictatorship look like a quaint lifestyle. Good Bye, Lenin! plays with this danger knowingly, and it is why the film can be read as comedy and as comment.

What It Tells Us

Record, Reputation and Memory

The same three categories from Chapter 1 apply to the whole course.

What to Read and Watch Next

• The films themselves. Watch one from each stage in the table above and compare how they treat the past.
• Archives and broadcasters. The public broadcasters' online libraries and the DEFA Foundation's holdings are good starting points (Chapters 5 and 7).
• Related courses. The sibling course Japanese Film & Television 1 asks similar questions about another country's screens, and the other Culture courses on this site, such as Jeux Sans Frontières (It's a Knockout): Europe's Game Show, place German television in a wider European setting.
• Histories and criticism. Look for histories of German cinema and broadcasting, and for studies of memory and film, which put the works in context.
• Your own memory. If you watched any of these, write down what you recall and then test each point against a source.

A Closing Thought

German film and television may look like a collection of genres, from silent horror to Sunday-night crime. Underneath, the thread that holds them together is a country working out, in public and in front of a camera, what to do with its own history. That makes it a good subject for a course, and a good reason to keep watching.

Exercises

Course complete. Return to German Film & Television 1 for the scope and sources.