From Contemporary Witness to Professional Actor Strategies of Personalizing History on TV at the Epochal Threshold of the 21st Century

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Silke Satjukow
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 228622483

At the beginning of the 21st century, the media impartment of history seems to have reached a crossroads: With the dying of contemporary witnesses to National Socialism, professional actors take their places. They render an artistic presentation of the vanished witnesses themselves and their messages and thereby reclaim more and more of an interpretive dominance with mass appeal - and are granted this prerogative by society.A first inventory displays four strategies of personalization which are commonly used today: The use of witnesses of the next generation, re-enactment in documentaries, the artistic staging of contemporary witness testimonials, and the dramatization of historical topics in feature films. At present, we cannot make valid statements about how these modes of presentation are perceived by the viewers. The research sub-project will therefore analyze the conditions and especially the effects of the change in history impartment at the epochal threshold from contemporary witness to actor. By analyzing TV movies about the time of National Socialism and with special focus on the respective personalization strategies used, we aim to explore how adolescents in Eastern and Western Germany as well as in Austria perceive messages about perpetrators and victims and integrate them into their horizons of meaning and lifeworlds. With this qualitative study, which synergetically interconnects methods of historiography and media studies, a knowledge base shall be developed within the frame of the umbrella project: History Impartment in the Media Society, which might also serve as future expertise for the media industry.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants