Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation: Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter and the Politics of Emotion

Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation: Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter and the Politics of Emotion LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER Gettysburg College When the ZDF miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter aired in March 2013, promoters and critics heralded it as the German television event of the year. Beginning in 1941, before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the miniseries relays the story of five friends, all in their early twenties – two Wehrmacht soldiers (Wilhelm and Friedhelm), one singer (Greta), one newly charged front nurse (Charlotte), and one Jew (Viktor) – who promise on the eve of different deploy- ments to reunite in Berlin when the war is over, “bis Weihnachten.” In the course of three instalments and 270 minutes, the miniseries graphically depicts the hor- rors of the eastern front, a conquest that was neither swift nor successful, and the emotional and moral devastation of its protagonists. The miniseries concludes in 1945 with the promised reunion, albeit under circumstances far from those once imagined. Its promotional campaign credits the film with introducing a new phase in processing the collective trauma Germans incurred through their experiences in the Second World War: namely, by bringing to life the war generation, full of youth, hopes, and dreams, it facilitates an intergenerational dialogue to break the “silence” on family involvement in war crimes and National Socialism and on the trauma incurred by soldiers (Hempel, “Fernsehereignis”; on cultural trauma, see Alexander; on collective silence, see Giesen; Heimannsberg and Schmidt). Drawing on average more than seven million viewers per episode, the media event clearly struck a nerve in the German psyche, begging the question to what extent hype and fact indeed converge. 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 borne out through time (see Cooke and Silberman). Within this chronology, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter ap- pears at a point when cultural representations of non-Jewish German suffering in the Second World War are flooding the market (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder- Skinner; Taberner and Berger; Schmitz). As the last members of the war generation die, these representations not only furnish visual or literary entertainment but also provide a social platform for today’s generations of Germans to discuss publicly their nation’s past. The memory debates they fuel reflect tensions between transnational and national memory narratives and the political dimen- sions of who and what is included in the construction of the national imaginary. seminar 50:1 (February 2014) Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 105 They document a move towards a history that is felt, towards a story that allows an emotional connection with familial experiences of the Second World War (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner 3–23; von Moltke, “Sympathy” 17). In what has been called the “shift from 1968 to 1989” (von Moltke, “Sympathy” 20), these cultural representations of German suffering in the war make German victimhood alongside the Holocaust a competing, if controversial, national narra- tive since unification (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner; Taberner and Ber- ger; Schmitz). Since their constructions of the German war experience both reflect and influence public attitudes, their constitutive role in the memory politics of the Federal Republic warrants examination. Proclamations that Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter begins yet a new phase in working through a collective German trauma (Schirrmacher) refer to the programmatic emotionalization of the German war experience that consciously skirts conventional didactic discussions on questions of guilt and shame. Just as the American miniseries Holocaust once made Jewish suffering first “real” and “feelable” to German audiences in the late 1970s, so, too – in this thinking – the German miniseries makes the traumatization of ageing parents and grandparents first palpable for their descendants (Hofmann, “Töten”). The miniseries stands, however, in a long line of cultural representations of German victimhood that constitute the “current pervasive emotional turn in Germany’s media landscape” (von Moltke, “Politics” 234), thus tempering radical pronouncements of taboo- breaking. More accurately, one could speak of an intentional suspension of moral judgement on the war generation in order to reclaim its emotional experience of life under National Socialism, indeed, in order to imbue it with life. Cen- tral to the film’s success is the intimacy with which it portrays generational perspectives on the war, allowing the film to speak for the (grand)parents in an intergenerational dialogue. Thus, the film’s production design, promotional campaign, and, to a certain extent, response in the media construct the sense that finally something is expressed on an emotional level that has been socially and privately suppressed for decades. In this vein, this study outlines the memory machinations surrounding the film by contextualizing its production, promotion, and reception in the German media within the politics of emotion that undergirds the genre of historical docudrama. Doing so crystallizes the film’s contribution to memory debates on Ger- man victimhood and a “national” memory founded in private, family narratives of wartime suffering. In his study of docudramatization, Tobias Ebbrecht notes that “the subjective perspective of German event television and docudrama,” with its blurring of fiction and reality, corresponds with “forms of collective and family memory in Germany,” as neither “‘distinguish[es] as accurately in fiction and reality as science does.’ Television and other media ‘manifest apparently authentic but in reality highly artificial perspectives on events and become mod- els for the interpretation of how something happened’” (“Docudramatizing” 49, citing Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 105). Media pronouncements (from the production team or reviewers) that the film is historically accurate, even as it 106 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER represents generational experiences of the war from the subjective perspective of that very generation, underscore a political volatility inherent when emotion mixes with what is viewed as truth. Considering the formative power of television and media events on understandings of the past, the docudrama’s determina- tion of “how it really was” figures in social contestations on which histories will be remembered and how. Its representation of the war generation and its experiences reflects the production team’s intent to invoke empathy with the perpetra- tors or contestations on how the events are portrayed. The memory politics that come to light speak to the reification of what Johannes von Moltke has termed a “romantic nationalism” (“Sympathy” 18) in process since unification. They highlight continuing tensions between historical consciousness and emotional engagement on the German past in Germany today. Making the War Generation Come Alive: The Docudrama between Authenticity and Emotion In his study “Codes and Conventions of Dramadoc and Docudrama,” Derek Paget sees the genre’s affective power in “a distinctively twentieth-century faith in images – especially moving ones” (206). Ebbrecht, in suit, aligns the docudrama’s signature blending of documentary and fictional modes of representation with “the audience’s desire to see their own received understanding of history confirmed by historical evidence” (“Docudramatizing” 40). It follows that what is depicted plays to a faith in moving images as “representatives for historical truth” and the desire to “see how historic events took place” (40). Paul Cooke sees in these aesthetics a strategy to construct “an emotional bridge between the past events on the screen and the experience of the viewing audience” (555–56; see also Ebbrecht, “Docudramatizing” 50). The docudrama thereby signals through this emotive technique “the continued relevance of this past event for the present- day viewer” (Cooke 555). The brainchild of producer Nico Hofmann (born 1959), Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter clearly displays these aesthetics. The film spawns directly from Hofmann’s teamWorx television hit Dresden (2006), itself eventful in its fictio- nalization of the Allied bombings and their aftermath. Positive public resonance to Dresden inspired Hofmann, along with ZDF director of fiction Heike Hempel and scriptwriter Stefan Kolditz, to continue the story of the Second World War’s effect on Germans – this time, however, not in the melodramatic style of Dres- den but rather “mit einer anderen Authentizität” (Hofmann, “Krieg”). Though the miniseries supposedly breaks with melodrama in order to deliver historical “reality,” its representation of this history clearly shares techniques of the historical docudrama perfected in other teamWorx productions of the last decade, such as Die Flucht (2007), Die Luftbrücke (2005), and the aforementioned Dresden. Docudrama’s focus on ordinary citizens in extraordinary events – in Unsere Müt- ter, unsere Väter youthful, ordinary Germans during the losing years of the Sec- ond World War – encourages viewers to identify with the main characters (Paget 196–97), to feel for and with them, and to agree with their view on historical Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 107 events (von Moltke,

Load more