The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Dresden: The Return of History as Soap

136 Dresden The Return of History as Soap Wilfried Wilms If we recall for a moment the stir caused in the German public sphere by W. G. Sebald’s theses vis-à-vis the Air War a mere decade ago, we may find ourselves amazed by the tempo at which real-existing or perceived memory gaps have been filled in the German public arena. In the mid1990s , Sebald could point to a near complete absence in popular memory about the Air War.1 Unsure of how his theses were to be received, he in fact deemed it necessary to provide something like a“reception guide” in an expansive postscript to his lectures. Clearly, his greatest apprehension was the potential abuse of his provocative work by revanchists on the political right.2 Less than a decade later these worries would surely have been put to rest.3 The politics of the ZDF television event of 2006 may lie, somewhat paradoxically, in how it depoliticizes the Air War to a degree that the packaging of the event now resembles that of late afternoon soaps.Noteworthy,in this context,may be the increasing feminization of Germany’s storytelling. Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) focalizes its narrative through Hitler’s secretary,and the two recent megaevents on German television, Dresden (2006) as well as Die Flucht (The Flight, 2007), similarly had a female protagonist as their focus. one way to explain this curious phenomenon seems obvious: if we accept the thesis that a fundamental desire for normalization in the age of European integration accompanies these productions, then the coveted badge of victimhood can more easily be obtained through someone who did not bear arms.4 The experience of the Nazi years is instead filtered through layers of transnational worship and passion that, more often 02 Chapters_4_6.indd 136 7/7/10 7:55 AM 137 Dresden: The Return of History as Soap than not, runs contrary to official state policy when a German nurse loves a British airman or a Prussian landowner a French forced laborer. In the following, I will revisit the TV event Dresden to discuss how state-sponsored television in particular has been shrewdly mining both Germany’s violent past and contemporary desires for its normalization and commercial exploitation. once again Germans work through their past by means of a miniseries. Yet, whereas the NBC miniseries Holocaust provided in 1979 historical simulations for “the” German as perpetrator , recent television events allowed Germans to see themselves as victims during the Second World War.5 Even though Dresden tried hard to envelop itself in an aura of taboo-breaking political and moral immediacy before its screening,the result was a consensus-driven,pseudopolitical telenovela. First, I will provide a more detailed account of the film’s narrative and background. Second, I will revisit other politicized visualizations of the raid on Dresden in previous decades in both the East and West. And finally, I will draw attention both to the media hype surrounding Dresden and to other examples of recent fictional event television . “Dresden: The ZDF Movie Event of the Year” The city below is ablaze, its blistering inferno lights up the cloudy skies. We, the voyeuristic onlookers, soar through the clouds after a job well done. Computer animation provides us with this bird’s-eye view, lifting us out of our recliner chairs into the rear-gunner’s seat of the British Lancaster. It is 22:30, as the screen indicates. The first wave just dropped its deadly load on Dresden, and the fires below are only beginning to merge into a firestorm that will kill thousands. It’s hell on earth below. Before joining the relative calm above for a moment of respite, we are down on the ground, experiencing the violence firsthand.And now that things are really warming up we’ll have another look—for some thirty minutes we will mingle with all those caught up in the bedlam down below. We leave the sonorous, monotonous droning of the four-engine bomber behind and join, first, yet another onlooker.We enter the home of Simon Goldberg (kai Wiesinger), a Jew who has so far survived the Nazi persecution because of his marriage to a German gentile, Maria (Marie Bäumer). But we know something that Maria does not know: Simon has been summoned to come to a collection point; his deporta02 Chapters_4_6.indd 137 7/7/10 7:55 AM [3.140.198.43] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 11...