10 - Eberhard Fechner’s History of Suffering: TV Talk, Temporal Distance, Spatial Displacement

Summary

THIS ESSAY HAS two general aims: to reintroduce Eberhard Fechner as an important filmmaker and oral historian from the era that roughly corresponds to the New German Cinema and to think about the problem of “identification” in new ways. Guido Knopp claims that depictions of the suffering inflicted and experienced by Germans in the middle of the twentieth century have led to a standoff between the two extremes of “Trauerarbeit” (work of mourning) and “Identitätsfindung” (search for identity) that mark the history of television practice and theory in the Federal Republic. Rather than a decisionist choice between more “aestheticist” or more “realistic” material, these poles offer the critic a productive tension. Having elsewhere discussed this tension in feature films from the 1990s, I consider it here in relation to television, history, and cultural memory. After briefly staking out the claims of Saul Friedländer and Michael Geisler as representatives of the two positions needing negotiation, as well as Robert Rosenstone’s elaboration of historians’ concerns about history and movies, I develop a medium-specific approach to television that allows us to better understand the possibilities of different generic approaches to the past. Understand ing the role of the “oral” within the pre-digital televisual medium in the FRG will open up an approach to the way “history” is constructed in Der Prozess — Eine Darstellung des Majdanek-Verfahrens in Düsseldorf (The Trial — A Presentation of the Majdanek Proceedings in Dusseldorf, 1984). In this three-part film made specifically for television, Fechner offers a particularly apt and critical entrance into enactments of cultural memory construed through a discourse about suffering rather than a depiction of it. This entrance, I will argue, is enabled by shifting the pursuit of historical suffering away from attempts to transform an internal subjective state into a temporal and spatial constellation marked by the insoluble tensions between “there and then” and “here and now” inherent in television aesthetics.

Work on Mourning and Identification

Before turning to television studies to help map out those tensions, I note that ideas of temporal distance and spatial displacement have often arisen in debates on the appropriate representation of German history. Saul Friedländer might well be adduced as a voice representing the “Trauerarbeit” side of the scheme.