Waves of Memory: Cinema, Trauerarbeit and the Third Reich
Waves of Memory: Cinema, Trauerarbeit and the Third Reich

Summary/Abstract: Working through the shameful period of the national past and coping with the heritage of the Third Reich was a struggle dominating all levels of post-war German intellectual and cultural life including New German Cinema. In my presentation I theorize how filmmakers associated with the movement hoped to map up the various factors which not only gave birth to Fascism but kept it alive in the social unconscious even after its downfall. Using the insights of Theodor W. Adorno and Pierre Nora, I overview the birth of a cinematic memory-tradition in the 1970s which turned to both narrative and documentary (nonfiction) filmmaking not in order to escape (or urge people to escape) remorse once and for all through a kind of final solution to memory, but with the aim to develop an alertness to both the objective socio-cultural conditions and the unconscious recesses of the German identity that helped Fascism to power. The symbolic destruction of the Berlin Wall Germany may have lead to the geographical unification of Germany, but the reconstruction of national unity and identity required the extension of self-reflection and mass analysis through memory to every German. Cinema and especially the authors who once initiated the 70s movement again played a key role in this second wave of working through the Nazi past. Although these works come out of the hands of much-experienced filmmakers, I argue that they do not deepen previously established methods of memory-work, only make them more accessible for the global spectator.

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