Lecture with Prof. Michael Braun, Memory Contests: Neue deutsche Erinnerungskulturen im Film

Since unification in 1990, the number of films dealing with Germany’s various pasts has surged. The problem they confront us with, however, is no longer how to come to terms with the past (“Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,” Adorno), but how to convey the cultural challenges of an ambivalent heritage. German Memory Contests (Anne Fuchs) confronts the realms of private vs. the public, family vs. generation, victims vs. perpetrators, and fact vs. fictions, opening up a dialogue which aims to transform “bad history” into a positive account of the past in terms of film narration. This lecture presented films significant for confronting a different kind of iconoclastic, pluralistic, and fictionalized memory. What happens if filmmakers insert new narratives to well-known histories (like Bryan Singer in Valkyrie – Operation Walküre with Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg)? Or if they even change the past in alternative narratives of resistance and counter-terror (like Tarantino)? And how do these films change our image of the German past? 

Professor Michael Braun is the director of the literature department at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and the author of numerous publications dealing with memory and German culture, including the 2010 “Wem gehört die Geschichte? Erinnerungskulture in Literatur und Film.”