Docudramatizing history on TV

Tobias Ebbrecht (1)

1 Film and Television Academy `Konrad Wolf'

The 60th anniversary celebration of the end of the Second World War became an important political, social and media event. Memory rituals, speeches and official announcements, celebrations, movies and reports created an ensemble of social activities that re-dramatized the historic event. In these kinds of memorial rituals the re-dramatization of history becomes part of collective memory, in which a shared image of historic incidents is created. Media and especially television play an important role in this making of history. Today, television is one of the most important agents for communicating historical events. At the same time the tendency of historical television documentary is to adopt increasingly popular forms and elements of feature films. This has led to a popular form of historical event television. One of its main genres is the docudrama. The article reviews contemporary docudramas about Nazism and Second World War on German television.

Mots clés: docudrama; documentary; German television; historical event television; memory; Nazism; Second World War

Tobias Ebbrecht. Docudramatizing history on TV. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2007, 10 (1), pp.35-53. ⟨10.1177/1367549407072969⟩. ⟨hal-00571533⟩