4 - Unifying Legacies of National History?

Summary

In the previous chapters, we saw how German film after 1990 offered its viewers intimate and immersive experiences of the Third Reich. But cinema and television also approached dictatorship, war, and genocide as historical experiences in the process of becoming public legacies. Such productions explore the impact that the Nazi past continues to have on the present and assess its relevance for the future. As the question mark in the title of this chapter indicates, the question is whether the legacies presented in postreunification German film about the Third Reich unite or divide, and where the boundaries between those united or divided by them lie. For this purpose, the chapter places cinema and television in the context of the debates about national identity and collective belonging that resurfaced in Germany after 1990. The two media have both reflected and influenced these debates, defining the legacy of the Nazi past in contrasting ways.

A contested yet crucial term in German debates about the legacy of the Nazi past is “Normalisierung” (normalization). The term originated in the early years of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship, characterizing the attempt to normalize, and, according to its critics, relativize the position of the Third Reich in German history. Normalization sought a rehabilitation of national identity toward the inside, and Germany’s acknowledgement as a country like any other toward the outside. According to Paul Cooke and Stuart Taberner, German reunification both reaffirmed and transformed the effort to normalize Germany’s self-image and role in the world. In foreign politics, “Normalisierung” aimed at Germany’s recognition as “an esteemed friend of its former enemies” and “a country which had learnt from its past and successfully aligned itself with liberal, democratic values.” The Schröder government of the Berlin Republic continued the process of normalizing German history and identity, albeit from a different generational and political background. In 1998, Gerhard Schröder famously encapsulated a new “Unbefangenheit” (unselfconsciousness) toward the Nazi past in his vision of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as “ein Ort, an den man gerne geht” (a place to which one likes to go). In fact, what Cooke and Taberner recognize as one of Schröder’s major achievements is the promotion of a less troubled attitude toward the national past and being German.