GERST 3410 - [History Will Be Televised]

(CA-AS) Satisfies Option 1.

Fall or Spring. Next Offered: 2020-2021. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: any German course in the 3000-3200 level or equivalent, by placement test or permission of instructor. Taught in German.

E. Siegel.

When the American TV series “Holocaust” was broadcast in West Germany in 1979, more than 20 million people watched. Journalists and historians were baffled by the viewers’ deeply emotional response, since no such reaction had followed previous attempts to confront Germans with the Shoah. Was a TV mini-series really the right way to address the Holocaust? Today, barely a day goes by without some fictional, docufictional, or documentary film/series covering the Holocaust, German unification, 1970s terrorism, etc. Are these examples of “histotainment” or “historical pornography”? Is history a commodity to identify with Holocaust-victims one day and with Germans who died during WWII the next? How do TV-narratives react to or influence collective memory? This course explores selected TV films/series and their ensuing debates, both contrasted with other approaches to ‘televising history, e.g. Edgar Reitz’ epic series “Heimat.”