Televising Tainted History: Recent TV Docudrama

(Dresden, March of Millions, Die Gustloff)

and the Charge of Revisionism

Elke Heckner

Recently, three blockbuster television docudramas—Dresden (2006), March

of Millions (Die Flucht, 2007), and Die Gustloff (2008)—have inaugurated
new rules for engaging with the tainted war experience of German civilians
at the end of World War II.1 Representing the latest effort to reclaim Ger-
many’s haunted experience of displacement and bombardment at the end
of the Nazi period, these three docudramas break with a cinematography
infused by the guilt-and-shame paradigm.2 This paradigm—exemplified by

1. The ship Die Gustloff was named for the Swiss party leader Wilhelm Gustloff, who was
assassinated in 1936. It first served as a Strength through Joy cruise ship and was later recommis-
sioned as a navy ship. In 1945 it was used to evacuate German civilians along with military person-
nel from Gotenhafen.
2. What I call the “guilt-and-shame paradigm” is the prescriptive ethical demand first put in place
by the Allies that Germans must atone for their war crimes. As Donald Bloxham argues, this moral
imperative was reinforced by initial American principles of occupation and JCS 1067, a directive
issued in April 1945 to the commander in chief of the U.S. Occupation Forces. The directive outlined
the basic policies of occupation in the U.S. zone, including denazification and the treatment of Ger-
many as an “enemy nation.” In the postwar years the paradigm took on the shape of a “formula of
collective guilt” (Genocide on Trial: War Crimes and the Formation of Holocaust History and Mem-
ory [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 139). The majority of the population rejected this formu-
lation, and the disavowal of German war guilt expressed itself in numerous exculpatory narratives
about Nazi organizations and individuals. These exculpatory narratives, circulated as Nazi propaganda
at the end of the war, had specifically evoked notions of German victimhood to offset Nazi war crimes.
New German Critique 112, Vol. 38, No. 1, Winter 2011
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2010-023  © 2011 by New German Critique, Inc.

65
66   Televising Tainted History

Frank Wisbar’s antiwar film Darkness Fell over Gotenhafen (Die Nacht fiel
über Gotenhafen, 1959)—has been mostly about expiating German war guilt.
In stark contrast, Dresden, March of Millions, and Die Gustloff move far
beyond rituals of atonement. They have gone so far as to restore cinematic
pleasure by savoring the drama intrinsic to these tainted histories, channeling
it into the genre of event TV. They can afford to do so, it seems, because their
directors, especially Roland Suso Richter and Kai Wessel, explicitly pledged
to scrutinize this controversial history through a nonrevisionist, even antirevi-
sionist lens.3 What is more, Dresden, March of Millions, and Die Gustloff put
forth a populist reckoning with the civilian experience during the last years of
the Third Reich that amounts to its own kind of televisual coming to terms
with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung).
Initiated by Dresden and quickly thereafter March of Millions, produced
for the public television stations ZDF and ARD, respectively, the docudra-
matic approach to the unsavory pasts of bombardment and displacement has
presented audiences with an easily accessible medium for a broad-based, col-
lective catharsis delivered in the unthreatening mode of histotainment. As
the directors of these docudramas sought to wrest the tainted history of Ger-
man civilians from the exculpatory narratives of the right while reimagining
these histories for the present within a postunification framework, they put
in place framing narratives and strategies of disidentification intended to
thwart appropriation by the right wing. Specific examples of this defiant tele-
visuality include Richter’s multiperspectival narration of the bombardment
of Dresden, which features British and German Jewish points of view; Joseph
Vilsmaier’s slapstick parody of the Nazis; and Wessel’s contention that Hit-
ler’s war on Europe finally caught up with German populations in the East.
This message, incidentally, resonates with the DVD commentary on Dresden:
that the German trauma of bombardment was preceded by Joseph Goebbels’s
declaration of total war on Europe.

With the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from the Eastern territories, the myth of German vic-
timhood reemerged in the postwar years and was deployed to counter claims of Nazi atrocities. Only
later did the 68 generation adopt the guilt-and-shame paradigm as an appropriate framework for
working through the wartime experience, especially the complicity, of their parents’ generation.
Within leftist circles the ethical claims of guilt and shame were reinterpreted as ideologically correct
imperatives that prescribed how the German wartime experience could be represented.
3. By revisionism I mean interpretations of the Nazi period that exculpate Germans from the
crimes of the Third Reich. Nonrevisionist accounts of history do not adopt this viewpoint, nor do
they critically examine its basic assumptions. Antirevisionist reinterpretations explicitly take on
exculpatory narratives, seeking to contest and undermine them.
 Elke Heckner   67

Critics have, however, remained skeptical as to whether the new televisu-

ality of German trauma has much to contribute to a critical rethinking of these
highly charged chapters in public memory.4 At issue is, predictably, whether
this televisuality effectively departs from the various mythologies of German
victimhood claimed by revisionist discourses of the expellee generation and
the political right wing. Aside from Vilsmaier’s mobilizing of the emotional
power of images to tacitly suggest an analogy between the plight of German
refugees and victims of the Holocaust, these three docudramas do not lend
themselves to revisionist interpretations of history. Such revisionism has tradi-
tionally instrumentalized the suffering of German civilians by deploying a
faulty logic of compensatory analogy, such as the one equating German suffer-
ing to that of the Holocaust.5 Nor can these docudramas be seen as advocating
the right to return to a homeland—a putative right claimed by certain expellee
groups, which has historically involved contesting the current German-Polish
border. Such clarification is necessary in view of certain reviews such as those
published in Der Spiegel, which suggest that March of Millions and Die Gust-
loff engage in a full-blown revival of the myth of German victimhood. This
interpretation has been reinforced by Bill Niven, who pioneered the impor-
tant field of the history of “Germans-as-victims” discourses and who calls
attention to a dangerous exonerative narrative he deems at work in all three
docudramas.6 This narrative, which builds up in Dresden and March of Mil-
lions and culminates in the “revisionist cinema” of Die Gustloff, ostensibly
exonerates ordinary Germans of war guilt as it attributes blame for Nazi crimes
exclusively to the military: “Ordinary Germans were not Nazis, is the asser-
tive message of all three films” (“Good Captain,” 84, 95).
The return of the revisionist label prompts the following question: does
this vantage point provide a productive framework for gauging the new aesthet-
ics of the televisual coming to terms with the past proffered by the docudramas?
I contend that this label primarily operates as a term of indictment and less as
an analytic category, thereby limiting its critical scope. The first part of the
article examines Niven’s claims, in particular to what extent the docudramas

4. Christian Buß, “Tut-tut, hier kommt der Opfer-Dampfer,” Der Spiegel, March 1, 2008, www
.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,538627,00.html.
5. By analogizing German civilian suffering to the suffering caused by the Holocaust, this logic
suggests that German civilians are exonerated from charges of war crimes to the degree that they
themselves suffered.
6. Bill Niven, “The Good Captain and the Bad Captain: Joseph Vilsmaier’s Die Gustloff and
the Erosion of Complexity,” German Politics and Society 26, no. 4 (2008): 82–98. Hereafter cited
as “Good Captain.”
68   Televising Tainted History

bear out his assertions or contest them. In discussing Niven’s choice of a cine-
matic countermodel to the revisionist docudramas—namely, Darkness Fell
over Gotenhafen—I show that the parameters the film offers for a critical com-
ing to terms with the past are historically contingent at best and thus cannot be
transposed to the specific geopolitical and cultural location of Germany in the
first decade of the twenty-first century. The second part of this article proposes
a rethinking of the narrow parameters in which the revisionist label has been
used in favor of a larger consideration of how Dresden, March of Millions, and
Die Gustloff contribute to the project of a coming to terms with the past, popu-
list or otherwise. Drawing on Aleida Assmann’s nuanced deconstruction of the
seemingly irreconcilable opposition between invocations of German wartime
suffering and expiation of war guilt—which leads her to conclude that the invo-
cation of German trauma cannot be necessarily reinscribed into a narrative of
exoneration in all instances7—I argue that much of the debate around the revival
of the myth of German victimhood in the TV docudramas stems from the pre-
carious tension between the docudramas’ affective re-presenting (Vergegen-
wärtigung) of the historical experiences of bombardment and displacement,
on the one hand, and the televisual coming to terms with the past supposedly
enabled by it, on the other.8 As I show, this tension engenders its own founda-
tional myths of a distinctly postunification imaginary, for instance, the inher-
ently democratic instincts of untainted characters who represent not only the
“good Germans” but also the new humanitarians of a coming age.

Automated Response: Revisionism

In describing the psychopolitical dynamics of self-censorship within leftist
circles of the 68 generation with regard to politically incorrect topics, Peter
Schneider reminds us that Helke Sander’s film Liberators Take Liberties
(Befreier und Befreite, 1992) was decried as revisionist in its time.9 Allegedly
violating political and aesthetic sensibilities, the feminist director Sander drew
attention to the mass rapes of German women during and after the conquest of
Berlin by Red Army troops—a topic that clearly unsettled the happy ideology
of Russians as antifascist liberators. From today’s point of view, the charge of

7. Aleida Assmann, “On the (In)Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory,”
German Life and Letters 59 (2006): 187–200. Hereafter cited as “(In)Compatibility.”
8. Re-presenting in this case designates the visualizing and staging of episodes of tainted his-
tory in the present.
9. Peter Schneider, “Deutsche als Opfer? Über ein Tabu der Nachkriegsgeneration,” in Ein Volk
von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–45, ed. Lothar Kettenacker (Berlin:
Rowohlt, 2003), 163.
 Elke Heckner   69

revisionism illustrates the ideological blind spots of some members of the 68

generation. Acknowledging the politically convenient uses of “revisionism”
does not mean discounting the real threats posed by a thriving revisionist
rhetoric in certain right-wing and neo-Nazi circles. Undoubtedly, revisionist
accounts of history continue to remain a pressing challenge in today’s postuni-
fication Germany. However, the rhetorical invocation of revisionism in the
context of Dresden, March of Millions, and Die Gustloff instantly locates these
docudramas within a right-wing ideological spectrum when, in fact, they seek
to counter, disrupt, and displace the persistent right-wing appropriation of the
histories of bombardment, expulsion, and displacement. I discuss below
whether the films unequivocally engage in a collective denial of the complicity
of ordinary Germans in war crimes.
In a recent article Niven alleges that Die Gustloff, along with Dresden
and March of Millions, merely reaffirms German victimhood:

Die Gustloff, as many newspaper critics noted, is the latest in a series of

two-part German television feature films that portray Germans as victims.
While Roland Suso Richter’s Dresden (2006) depicted victimhood at the
hands of Allied bombers, and Die Flucht (Flight, 2007) the victimhood of
Germans fleeing from the Russians, Die Gustloff shows the Germans as
victims of Soviet torpedoes—and, indeed as much so, of the German mili-
tary. (“Good Captain,” 85)

Niven’s implication that the films reproduce exculpating victim narratives rep-
resents a troubling automated response to the restaging of the tainted hi/stories
of the end of World War II. By automated response I mean the application
of a ready-made set of claims consistent with the guilt-and-shame paradigm.
Rhetorically, it works to indict the docudramas and obviates the possibility of
critical inquiry and with it novel ways of reimagining history. Deployed like
an indictment, the term victim assumes a seemingly self-explanatory moral
force that renders superfluous any broader consideration of the cultural con-
ditions that shaped these media productions, including the emergence of TV
docudrama and reality TV.10
Niven’s characterization of the films conveys the impression that the
docudramas represent the most recent incarnation of a particularly insidious
revisionism that affirms and valorizes German victimhood status. In particular,

10. For a discussion of the genre of docudrama, see Tobias Ebbrecht, “History, Public Memory,
and Media Event,” in Reconstructing the Past: History in the Mass Media, 1890–2005, ed. Sian
Nicholas, Tom O’Malley, and Kevin Williams (London: Routledge, 2008), 101–14.
70   Televising Tainted History

he suggests that this ode to victimhood is part of an all-too-familiar economy

of guilt in which Germans have sought to exonerate themselves of the war
crimes of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations by passing blame on to
real “Nazis.” Niven sees a special kind of compensatory economy at work
in the docudramas, which he credits to the films’ reception of Hannes Heer’s
Wehrmachtsausstellung (exhibition on the war crimes committed by the Ger-
man army in World War II). This exhibition dispelled the myth that the army
was not involved in war crimes. For Niven, the films’ accusatory representa-
tion of the callous brutality of Nazi forces exonerates and, in Vilsmaier’s case,
“whitewashes” civilians’ complicity (“Good Captain,” 85). In this reconfig-
ured version of the German exculpatory narrative, the Wehrmacht is “used as
a convenient dumping ground for German guilt, while vigorous attempts are
made to exonerate those not in the military: namely German civilians” (95).
Niven follows to the letter his claim about the displacement of guilt from
civilians to the military. First, he seeks to show that, historically, the military,
portrayed in Vilsmaier’s film as steering the former KDF (Kraft durch Freude)
cruise ship Die Gustloff to its titanic demise through sheer incompetence and
arrogance of power, cannot be held accountable for the fateful decisions sup-
posedly reached jointly with the civilian branch of the Handelsmarine. Second,
he extends the dichotomy between civilian innocence and military reckless-
ness, which figures prominently in Die Gustloff, to Dresden and March of Mil-
lions, claiming that these docudramas also exonerate civilians of the crimes of
Nazism. Niven seems to assume that Die Gustloff ’s claims to authenticity—
perfectly in sync with cinematic conventions of establishing an authenticity
effect—mean that the fiction film should be interpreted as documentary and
thus be held to standards of historical veracity. Doubtless, the docudramas’
restaging of historical memory cannot be exhausted in veracity-driven interpre-
tations, since movies do not merely reproduce “history”—or rather, what passes
as a certain version of history, according to some construct of the “real.”
Seeking to set the historical record straight, Niven offers a corrective to
what he sees as Die Gustloff’s scapegoating of the military. He faults the film
for not properly following the reconstructed history of the sinking of Die Gust-
loff as it has been authoritatively established, he claims, by the eyewitness
Heinz Schön. Rather than enact Schön’s balanced version, the docudrama con-
jures up a black-and-white conflict between the civilian and military branches
of the marine, in which the military wins out through an arbitrary imposition
of force, choosing the deepwater route, stopping the vessel after receiving a
radio transmission about a pending collision, and switching on the navigation
lights—thus becoming a visible target for the nearby S-13 Russian submarine.
While Die Gustloff suggests that the ship’s destruction, with more than nine
 Elke Heckner   71

thousand deaths, was due to military negligence and arrogance, Niven seeks to
show that the civilian and military branches in charge of the ship had a “col-
laborative” relationship; here Niven is citing Schön and the military transport
officer, navy captain Wilhelm Zahn (“Good Captain,” 87). Following Schön’s
version of events, Niven also acknowledges that there were objections by two
merchant navy officers: one protested taking the deepwater route; the other
one objected to turning on the navigation lights. Yet these objections are side-
lined by the narrative of collaboration asserted in both Schön’s and Zahn’s
reconstruction of events.
The status of these objections is crucial to any conclusion about the final
authoritative version of events. To clarify: I am interested not in evaluating
historical accuracy—that is, the question of whether the docudrama faithfully
represents what happened (a matter of significant debate)—but in the possi-
bility of different narratives based on available sources. From this perspec-
tive Niven’s article does not mention that Die Gustloff roughly follows Guido
Knopp’s 2001 version of events, which relies on eyewitness accounts that pro-
vide other perspectives than just Schön’s. These accounts also criticize the
military captains for securing lifeboats for themselves first, leaving evacuees
behind to fend for themselves.11 As I discuss in the second part of the article,
source material from the historical archive, especially the visual archive of
photography, is central to the docudramas’ filmic strategy of re-presenting.
The DVD commentaries to Dresden and March of Millions underscore the
directors’ commitment to minutely reconstructing historical settings to bolster
their fictionalized rendition of history—thus not only creating an authenticity
effect but also endowing the mise-en-scène with a claim to “truth in fiction.”
When considering Niven’s argument that foremost Die Gustloff, but also
Dresden and March of Millions, exonerates civilians of Nazi war crimes, it is
important to note that he creates the category of an ideologically “innocent”
civilian by deploying a questionable notion of identification—only later taking
issue with the notion of an untainted civilian experience. In seeking to distin-
guish civilians from Nazis identified with the military agenda, Niven writes:
“To be fair, Dresden and Die Flucht also depict the susceptibility of civilians
to the corrosion of moral standards. . . . Nevertheless, susceptibility, egoism
and weakness do not imply ideological identification. Civilians in Die Flucht
and Dresden are in no way identified with the savagery of the Nazis, the SS or
the Wehrmacht” (“Good Captain,” 94). In claiming that civilians are led to
compliance with the Nazi regime by base motives rather than by adherence to

11. Guido Knopp and Friederike Dreykluft, “Der Untergang der ‘Gustloff,’” in Guido Knopp,
Die grosse Flucht: Das Schicksal der Vertriebenen (Munich: Econ, 2002), 122.
72   Televising Tainted History

ideology, Niven releases civilians from culpability—a move that the docu­
dramas in general do not perform. In Dresden the hospital director Mauth,
who stashes away piles of morphine intended for his patients so that he can
start a new professional life in Switzerland, is clearly shown as morally cor-
rupted, but this does not render him any less culpable in the eyes of his daugh-
ter, whose critical point of view the film adopts. His subsequent death in
the firestorm further seems to underscore his complicity with the Nazi system.
In other words, while the docudramas distinguish between civilians and the
military, this distinction does not necessarily rehabilitate civilians from culpa-
bility or suggest that they are to a lesser degree complicit with the system.
Moreover, the distinction itself is shown to be unstable, as civilians are repre-
sented as embedded in the social and political practices of Nazism in visual
spaces coded throughout the films as saturated by Nazi ideology. The tight
imbrication of both civilian and military lives inside the Nazi regime is rep-
resented, especially in Dresden, where—except for Anna Mauth, Simon, and
Maria Goldberg—most characters are implicated in a Darwinian struggle for
survival and presented as complicit with the system to varying degrees. Simi-
larly, the fratricidal conflicts in March of Millions and Die Gustloff demon-
strate that the militarization of families renders difficult a clear distinction
between civilians and military folk. In March of Millions the conflict between
the brothers Ferdinand and Heinrich von Gernstorff, the former marked by
pacifist and the latter by legalist leanings, though both serve in the military,
reveals that the simple division of military versus civilian has been turned
inside out.
When the distinction between civilians and military is invoked, the
question arises whether it is indeed instrumentalized in the service of a logic
of exoneration or whether its deployment serves different purposes, such as
viewers’ disidentification with Nazi ideology. The didactic representation of
vicious cycles of brutal Nazi violence speaks to a different kind of ethical
demand the films make—one in which the reckoning with this tainted past
is part of a larger educational mission. In showing that the Nazi war front not
only has come home but manifests itself in senseless killing sprees against
assumed deserters, slave laborers, and civilians, March of Millions models
for viewers a position of disidentification and abjection that makes it diffi-
cult to empathize with the killers. The reign of Nazi terror is shown to be
alive and well in the deportation orders for Jews in Dresden, thus offsetting
the impression that only Germans are “victims”; Ferdinand, the rebellious
pacifist in the military family of the Gernstorffs, shares at the dinner table
how he has witnessed the killing of Poles and Jews. The docudramas com-
 Elke Heckner   73

plicate the traditionally reductive Germans-as-victims narrative, often by

evoking an anticipatory moment of coming to terms with the past repre-
sented through the characters. It is especially untainted characters who take
on this task.
When Lena Gräfin von Mahlenberg is shown to spurn her putative
fiancé, Heinrich von Gernstorff, over a dispute involving his signing of killing
orders for three supposed deserters, she models a democratic position from
which she can only reject his assertion that he acted at all times in compliance
with existing laws.

H.: I have never ever transgressed the prescribed, valid law, never.
L.: But that is exactly how you have granted absolution to this regime. You
don’t understand.
H.: Lena, don’t you see? We are tiny little cogs. We couldn’t stop it. What
should I have done?
L.: You are turning into one of them. You’re not any better.
H.: Lena, you expect too much of me. The hero you always wanted, that’s
not me. If I were to become a judge, in the highest court, then you will
understand.

In rejecting Heinrich’s legalist approach and along with it the abuse of law in
justifying atrocities, Lena anticipates a post-Nuremberg trial position. It is not
by chance that Heinrich’s father, Rüdiger, the most die-hard proponent of mili-
tarism, declares Lena the symbolic heir to the East Prussian noble lineage that
can be integrated into a Western democracy. After his symbolic act Rüdiger is
shown to hang himself, as he cannot adapt to the new order of existential insta-
bility in the wake of the displacement from the Eastern territories. Characters
like Lena, Anna Mauth in Dresden, and Hellmut Kehding in Die Gustloff
come to embody the democratic spirit of a new age about to begin. These char-
acters anticipate popular aspects of social and political attempts to come to
terms with Nazi history, for example, Helmut’s demand for accountability and
investigation into the fatal failure of Die Gustloff’s evacuation mission. At the
same time, these figures mark a stark departure from the Germans-as-victims
paradigm, as they are cast as resilient survivors performing unsolicited acts of
humanitarian intervention. Clearly, these new democratic TV role models for
the coming age instantiate a new kind of victim-turned-survivor mythology,
which necessitates a closer look but is not served by invoking old categories of
revisionism.
These instances of an anticipatory coming to terms with the past through
the development of characters reach beyond the antirevisionist framing devices
74   Televising Tainted History

referred to earlier. They represent attempts to resituate the traditional, highly

charged history of German suffering within a larger cultural-political frame-
work of German trauma that recognizes the complex legacy of the Germans-
as-victims discourse alongside the victimization of others by the Nazis (such
as Europe’s Jews, slave laborers, and prisoners of war). Undoubtedly, this rec-
ognition is bound by the very limits of what the popular imaginary considers
“victims of Nazism,” but even this awkward and incomplete recognition of
the suffering of others at the hands of the Nazis is more complicated than tra-
ditionally revisionist accounts of German victimhood.
This different framework has also displaced the aesthetic paradigm of the
guilt-and-shame logic and with it the centrality of discourses of exculpation,
which signify a different historical time. This is to say not that exculpatory nar-
ratives about complicity—civilian or military—in war crimes no longer have
their place in public and private histories but that their very modes of articula-
tion have shifted and that public scrutiny has to a certain degree contained eas-
ily recognizable narratives of exculpation in the public sphere. The docudramas
themselves represent and perform this larger cultural shift away from the guilt-
and-shame paradigm that supposedly has been aesthetically mastered with
great insight in Wisbar’s antiwar film. However, to treat this movie as a paragon
of critical filmmaking may be premature. Atoning for German war guilt while
supporting the fiction that an uncanny alien military power has befallen the
good citizens and soldiers portrayed in the film, Darkness Fell over Goten-
hafen is a scathing indictment of the German militarism and the death toll it
exacted. An admonishing voice-over recounts the fatalistic military policies
that sent its soldiers into harm’s way and that turned German women as such
into a class of victims: “In the wake of the initial victories a veritable flood of
decorations poured over the men of the army, which slowly transformed into
wooden crosses. From Narvik to Tobruck, from Monte Cassino to Stalingrad.
And the German women paid for the men’s valor and their readiness to die,
with lonely, sleepless nights, with lover’s empty arms and hopeful waiting, paid
with endless streams of tears.” The sense that Nazi officers and soldiers, as well
as civilians, are subject to a violent force in which they are implicated but which
they did not help unleash is underlined through an abstract montage in which
military decorations turn into wooden crosses, anony­mous graveyard markers.
These crosses seem to symbolize an abstract force commanding its subjects
to act while exempting them from any responsibility.
Steeped in a mea culpa rhetoric, the film portrays the devastating psy-
chic and physical costs of Nazi warfare on Europe that have come to the home
front late in World War II, leading to a flood of displaced German civilians.
 Elke Heckner   75

Firmly located in the guilt-and-shame paradigm, Wisbar deploys a didactic

voice-over to contextualize the plight of civilians within Nazi militarism.
He frames the film’s drama of the seduction and fall of the married protago-
nist Maria Reiser through self-reflective narrative disruptions sometimes per-
formed, in Brechtian fashion, by the protagonists themselves. For instance,
when Frau Kubelsky, a Jewish friend well known to the captain and several
crew members, is about to be deported, along with her father, and her plea to
the group for help goes unanswered, the captain despondently comments on
his own complicity and that of the crew by repeating the woman’s ironic words
that they are indeed “heroes” standing by and looking on. The deportation
scene is the only one that features Nazis in action—and they clarify their pro-
fessional status by stating that “we are here in an official capacity”—whereas
everybody else in uniform seems to exhibit an astonishing spirit of rule bend-
ing and neighborly helpfulness. The ship’s space is strangely located outside
Nazi ideology, and the potential link between wearing a uniform and milita-
rism is not explored. There is no calling German masculinity into question on
ideological grounds. This masculinity is shown to be problematic only with
respect to its overly rigorous moral conduct toward women; as we learn from
Hans Schott, who is defending Maria for her extramarital affair, bourgeois
norms are no longer applicable in times of war.
Interestingly enough, the film declares German women the true vic-
tims of Nazism, since the war was fought on their backs—a claim conveyed
affectively by images of weeping and wailing women. In certain ways Sander’s
Liberators Take Liberties lends historical specificity to these generalized
claims, which only indict the bourgeois order for straitjacketing women. Alle-
gorizing a stained nation, Maria does not survive but goes under, yet the Gen-
eral von Reuss lets viewers know that women, while embodying the victims
of Nazism, did little to resist the very order that demanded their self-sacrifice.
In Darkness Fell over Gotenhafen the problematic endorsement of women as
true victims of Nazism and the absence of any recognition that the ship’s cap-
tain and crew might be implicated in Nazism—beyond the deportation scene
in which they acknowledge their role as bystanders—render the film question-
able, at best, for rethinking contemporary cinematic representations of Ger-
mans as victims at the end of World War II. Unlike Dresden, March of Mil-
lions, and Die Gustloff, in which a handful of characters represent the yearning
for an untainted history, Wisbar’s film teems with ideologically untainted pro-
tagonists, complicated only by the transgression of 1950s sexual norms.
Today’s challenges for rescreening the tainted histories of German
civilians at the end of World War II—and thus turning these hi/stories of
76   Televising Tainted History

displacement and bombardment into lessons of civic education—go beyond

the narrow parameters set out in Darkness Fell over Gotenhafen. They involve
a displacement of the reductive victim narratives of German suffering, along
with their revisionist legacy. This displacement entails moments of a self-
reflective internal critique, for example, through slapstick episodes in Die
Gustloff that parody the emergence of little Hitlers in the military—a topic
that the subsequent genre of Hitler comedies has explored. The docudramas
attest to an intensive awareness of the debates that have shaped today’s per-
spectives on the expulsion and displacement of Germans from the Eastern
territories and the bombardment of Dresden. Thus the docudramas offer a post­
unification perspective filled with the invention of characters for the pres-
ent and the future. This cultural-political framework of the new televisuality
of German trauma is instantiated by the ethos of a belated familial, societal,
and political reconciliation intended to effect a specifically postunification
coming to terms with the past. The guilt-and-shame paradigm no longer dom-
inates early-twenty-first-century event televisuality but is rather the product
of a different historical era. As my discussion of Assmann’s astute analysis
of current constellations in German memory culture will show, the emergence
of this generationally different TV aesthetics cannot necessarily be equated
with a return of revisionist aesthetics or with concerted efforts to expunge
German war guilt.

New Generational Time of Memory?

In “On the (In)Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory,”
Assmann questions whether invoking German suffering is necessarily equiv-
alent to exonerating Nazis of their crimes. Her comments follow on the heels
of a thorough analysis of the various uses of the myth of German victimhood
at different points in German history. After discussing Heer’s critique of Jörg
Friedrich’s exculpatory study The Fire (Der Brand, 2002) as the most recent
example of the deployment of this myth,12 Assmann writes:

Once more I would like to emphasise that we should not underestimate the
Germans’ readiness to use the role of victim in order to veil or dismiss their
historical responsibility. At the same time, it would be wrong to interpret any
reference to suffering as a strategy to avoid, or even to deny, guilt. The logic

12. Hannes Heer, Vom Verschwinden der Täter: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner
war dabei (Berlin: Aufbau, 2004), 195–96. See Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bomben-
krieg, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002); The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945, trans.
Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
 Elke Heckner   77

in which the problem of the irreconcilable nature of guilt and suffering is at

present being discussed leads to a dead end. We cannot excise the experience
of suffering from family memories just because they are not politically cor-
rect. There is such a thing as a human right to one’s own memories, which
cannot be negated by taboos and censorship. (“(In)Compatibility,” 196)

If the very logic in which the debate on suffering, guilt, and representation
has been cast has reached its limits, then perhaps the time has come for a dif-
ferent kind of generational memory that would allow for a repositioning of the
terms of debate. The latest third-generation wave of artistic production that
seeks to excavate family memory dating back to the Nazis, however, holds
little promise for a change of terms, simply because this specific form of pri-
vate recuperation of memory is more often than not steeped in apologetic
and exculpatory rhetoric. Christian Graf von Krockow’s biographical narrative
of his sister’s trials and tribulations on her flight from the East, The Hour of
the Women (Die Stunde der Frauen, 1988), is no exception. It confirms that the
endorsement of femininity over a “one-sided masculine principle” perceived
as completely corrupt may speak to a new order of gender near the end of the
war, but it cannot reconfigure stereotypes of “Russians” as aliens quintes-
sentially violating the order of civility.13 March of Millions evokes this quasi-
emancipatory rhetoric of “the hour of the woman” when Lena’s father puts
her in charge of the trek of refugees as he stays behind.
Yet Assmann argues that private memories, even if politically incor-
rect, have their place in the heterogeneous fabric of social memory as long as
a hierarchy of national memory stays intact. As long as the Holocaust holds
an undisputed place in national memory, she contends, private memories of
suffering not only can be accommodated but ought to be articulated over and
against potential taboos and instances of censorship in the name of political
correctness. Thus Assmann’s pitch for freedom of expression concerning
private memories shifts the terms of the debate on suffering from “guilt” to
“political incorrectness”—a shift of terminology that speaks out against pub-
lic censorship of private memories but is rightly wary of the directions taken
by private discourse on World War II memory. Assmann sees little critical
potential in the artistic production of the third generation, which she calls
the “confessional generation” (Bekenntnisgeneration) (“(In)Compatibility,”
193). Her confessional generation, acting as the delegate of the parent gen-
eration that lived through World War II (Erfahrungsgeneration), is striving

13. Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Stunde der Frauen: Bericht aus Pommern, 1944 bis 1947
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1988), 9.
78   Televising Tainted History

“to establish that generation’s attitudes, wishes and values” (“(In)Compati-

bility,” 193). However, can all third-generation artistic production be sub-
sumed under the category of confessional generation? Specifically, do Dres-
den, March of Millions, and Die Gustloff fit into the narrow confines of this
category?
While Assmann’s characterization is on the mark for the recent wave
of (auto)biographical production, the new televisuality of Dresden, March of
Millions, and Die Gustloff goes beyond the yearning for transgenerational
recognition of family memory within a rhetoric and logic of apology. There
is a significant difference between the docudramas’ public mediation of the
memory of national trauma and, for example, Malte Ludin’s 2 or 3 Things I
Know about Him (2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, 2005), and it is impor-
tant to mark this difference within the spectrum of third-generation approaches
to memory. The docudramas’ claims are much larger, as they aspire not only
to a transgenerational mediation of memory at the national level but also to
transnational reconciliation—the belated postunification international recon-
ciliation (Völkerverständigung) with former World War II adversaries. The
live footage of the 2005 opening of Dresden’s Frauenkirche at the very end
of Dresden speaks to this new era of reconciliation over the bombing wars of
World War II, exemplified by Coventry’s sponsorship of the spire. The mini-
series positions itself as cultural ambassador of a TV-mediated transna-
tional reconciliation that painstakingly reconstructs multiple points of view
embodied by historical players: the rationale of the British bomber command
and its pilots, the multifarious wheelings and dealings of German civilians,
the disillusionment of the injured veterans, the fatalis­tic belief of Nazi offi-
cers in “final victory,” and the deportation of Jews that lasted through the
Allied bombings and that continued to function perfectly, as Ralph Giordano
states, even though German cities lay in rubble.14 While one of the produc-
ers’ claims that Auschwitz is written all over the film is certainly exaggerated,
Dresden deserves credit for the subplot of Simon Goldberg and his German
wife, Maria Goldberg (most likely inspired by the story of Victor Klemperer,
who survived the air raids in Dresden). However, the Frauenkirche’s narra-
tive of happy reconciliation also raises the question of how encompassing
and compelling this reconciliation truly is. The staunch opposition of Dres-
deners to the 2001 rebuilding of the city’s synagogue, for instance, is nowhere
mentioned on the DVD commentary.

14. Ralph Giordano, “Ein Volk von Opfern?” in Ein Volk von Opfern: Die neue Debatte um den
Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945, ed. Lothar Kettenacker (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003), 168.
 Elke Heckner   79

Similarly, March of Millions establishes the parameters for a narrative

of French-German reconciliation via a dramatic romance plot. The French
forced laborer François lectures Lena on the impossibility of being equals in
a war with clear-cut hierarchies of master and slave—but when, in a later
chance encounter with Lena in Bavaria, he is shown to have been promoted
by the Allies, the promise of transnational love reemerges. Rather than serve
as proxies for the experiences of the parent generation in Assmann’s sense,
the third-generation directors of Dresden and March of Millions—Richter
and Wessel—facilitate a transgenerational reconciliation between the parent
generation and third-generation viewers, and they transmit this televisual
production of family and national history to children of the third generation,
who are coming of age now. This work of mediation, however, is circum-
scribed by Cold War ideology, in which reconciliation seems possible with
all neighbors except the Russians.
In the spirit or rather the new mythology of reconciliation, the docu-
dramas also reveal a yearning for untainted characters, resilient individuals
who resist the Nazis and their brutal use of force. It is these characters who
become the forebears of a new democratic order by transforming the forces of
the old order. These mostly female characters are identificatory figures for the
viewers, as they are shown to articulate a vision of humanity in the midst of
and despite chaos, rubble, and lawlessness. Undoubtedly, a resignification has
reconfigured the standard victim narrative (such as in Wisbar’s 1959 film, in
which women were the true victims of Nazism). This reconfiguration involves
a broader victim-turned-survivor narrative in which protagonists are cast as
survivors who turn catastrophe into opportunity. Thus the crumbling order
of fascism becomes the backdrop for the resurrection of “good Germans,”
who will have an important role to play in the new society to come. When
Hellmut, the civilian captain of Die Gustloff, is shown to mutter under his
breath that he will seek to hold those accountable who through sheer incom-
petence wrought disaster, he clearly represents a silenced voice that will have
a say in postwar society.
To be sure, the docudramas aim to create a postunification televisual
community that shares these experiences within their own families and
genealogies. In fact, the affect-laden cinematography invites viewers to feel
and relive history—a mission spearheaded by ZDF. It flies in the face of ear-
lier cinematic approaches that sought to expose the mediatedness of affect—
along with the illusion of presence and immediacy—as effects produced by
the cinematic apparatus. Drawing on all registers of the cinema of illusion,
the recuperation of historical memory operates as a grand gesture of epic
80   Televising Tainted History

re-presenting—a presencing of the struggles and hardships of the civilian

population—whereby the past and the future implicate each other. This tem-
poral dynamic, I argue, is effectively postmemorial in the sense that the ret-
rospective staging of history occurs from a postunification and post-9/11
vantage point after the U.S. bombing of Baghdad. At the beginning of Dres-
den we hear one of the downed British pilots appeal to the Geneva Conven-
tions, which, in the context of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, evoke
much more than international rules governing prisoner of war status.15
Rather than consider the docudramas as confessional works subsum-
able under Assmann’s category of confessional generation, a rubric specifi-
cally organized around the personal and biographical, I classify the docu­
dramas as productions of a televisual “reconciliatory generation,” since they
explore much wider contexts and aim at international reconciliation. Thus
while works of the confessional generation are intent on rediscovering the
genealogical links between the parent generation and third-generation sub-
jects, the docudramas—while not dismissing the biographical—approach it
as material for large-scale, polyperspectival, and multilayered fictions that in
effect remake history and biography into an epic televisual spectacle designed
to do more than link generations: they aspire to generational, national, and
transnational reconciliation. Clearly, the different docudramas produced for
ARD and ZDF do not represent a monolithic approach to the histories of
civilians at the end of World War II—to refer to them as a trilogy would be
misleading—but they share a certain generational sensitivity, especially Dres-
den and March of Millions, both of them productions of Teamworx that exem-
plify cameraman Holly Fink’s affective approach to images.16 In strictly gen-
erational terms, Vilsmaier seems to be the odd one out, especially because of
his controversial record of Heimatfilme.
In contrast to the new generation of docudrama directors, such as Rich-
ter (Dresden) and Wessel (March of Millions), Vilsmaier (Die Gustloff) vio-
lates the assumption that the cinematic iconography of the Holocaust is off-
limits for a redeployment within representations of German suffering. He
evokes the emotional power of images associated with the Holocaust: refugees

15. For an excellent discussion of the rhetorical equation of the Allies’ bombardment of Dres-
den with the 2003 bombing of Baghdad, see Andreas Huyssen, “Air War Legacies: From Dresden
to Baghdad,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill
Niven (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 181–93.
16. For a discussion of the Teamworx approach to film, especially concerning Dresden, see
Paul Cooke, “Dresden (2006), Teamworx, and Titanic (1997): German Wartime Suffering as Hol-
lywood Disaster Movie,” German Life and Letters 61 (2008): 279–94.
 Elke Heckner   81

waiting to board are held back by barbed wire, and the sorting process invokes
the selection at the ramps of concentration camps. Clearly, being evacuated is
not the same as dying at Auschwitz, and it is mainly this troubling semantic
image transfer that moves Die Gustloff into revisionist territory. In this instance
Vilsmaier’s melodramatic re-presenting of the plight of refugees is not con-
tained or corrected by framing devices of an aspirational coming to terms with
the past. In fact, these scenes raise the question of whether this televisual hom-
age to the bombed-out and expellee generation can live up to the task of a
critical coming to terms with the past that its directors purport to perform.
For Richter and Wessel, the restaging of the tainted histories of Allied
aerial bombardment and civilian displacement from the Eastern territories
must occur within a decidedly antirevisionist and anti-exculpatory frame-
work. The DVD commentaries assert the necessity of breaking with the
right-wing appropriation of these topics, yet they remain leery of the ways in
which the debate into which the docudramas are making a critical interven-
tion might evade their control. The commentary on Dresden, for example,
contextualizes the Allied aerial bombardment as a response to Goebbels’s
concept of total war. A narrative voice introduces the “German trauma” of
the bombardment as follows: “With the bombing of the Royal Air Force, the
German population had to experience firsthand what the Nazis had inflicted
on the rest of Europe.” It is no small matter that the docudramas wrested the
historical legacy of German civilians at the end of World War II from the
clutches of the right wing, bringing it into the mainstream and thereby reduc-
ing the potential for further right-wing appropriation. In this respect both
directors differ from an uncritical recuperation of the notion of German vic-
timhood, which Assmann ascribes to much of the confessional generation. In
fact, both directors implicitly acknowledge Assmann’s demand for a norma-
tive framework of national memory built on the memory of the Holocaust,
which would then enable the narration of stories from what was hitherto con-
sidered ideologically tainted history.
For this reason, it seems appropriate to characterize the temporality
and location of these televisual productions of historiography as a specifi-
cally German variation of what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory.17 On

17. I have argued elsewhere that Hirsch’s notion of postmemory is central to rethinking the loca-
tion and temporality of second- and third-generation memories of the Holocaust. See Elke Heck-
ner, “Whose Trauma Is It? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of Postmemory,” in
Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and
Michael D. Richardson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 62–85.
82   Televising Tainted History

the one hand, it signifies the specifically German postunification and post-
9/11 location of memory aspiring to mediate between generations and his-
tories of former East and West—evoking the shared trauma of World War II.
On the other hand, it acknowledges the transatlantic situatedness of this
memory as it has been enabled by the transnational Holocaust memorial cul-
ture of the 1990s. As the example of Vilsmaier’s semantic transfer of Holo-
caust imagery shows, the affective cinematography of re-presenting must be
accountable to the larger televisual coming to terms with the past that the
docu­dramas claim to perform. This involves a critical perspective on the new
mythologies (such as the rhetoric of reconciliation and the claims of emanci-
patory potential) engendered by the tension between re-presenting and com-
ing to terms with the past. Even if the docudramas’ goal is to facilitate the
ongoing process of mourning by conjuring up one last time the wartime expe-
riences of German civilians in order to lay to rest the ghosts of the past, this
very insistence on closure and the terms of closure necessitates continued
critical attention.
In many ways the docudramas attempt to be much more than mere rep-
resentation: there is a reverential deference to the category of experience, espe-
cially in reenacting the Dresden firestorm and the relentless icy conditions the
refugees encounter on their trek. The production team intentionally exposed
actors to fire and subfreezing temperatures—though they digitally created
other scenes, for instance, those involving aircraft and bombardment—thus
passing on the affect produced by these “real-life” reenactments to the viewer.
Saturated with an overwhelming abundance of historical markers taken from
biographical narratives and photo and film archives, the docudramas seek to
enhance viewers’ immersion and recognition of historical events with seem-
ingly comprehensive, almost encyclopedic zest. The reenactment of German
trauma in Dresden and March of Millions leaves no question that the disinte-
grating totalitarian system, which the films implicitly put on trial through
various critical strategies—through what I call a soft critique of Nazism—was
profoundly criminal and ought to perish. The screenwriter of March of Mil-
lions, Gabriela Sperl, describes in the DVD commentary the docudrama’s ret-
rospective view of history as one that already includes the inklings of a future
democratic order: “It returns a memory for reflection and mourning. And it
narrates an epic story of a world that no longer exists and the emergence of a
new democratic world.”
The temporality of a new democratic order is embodied by a set of mor-
ally and politically uncorrupted and incorruptible characters who heroically
challenge the rationale, arrogance, and brutal force of the existing order of
 Elke Heckner   83

Nazism. Desire for the declared or assumed enemy—as in Erika Galetschky’s

case in Die Gustloff—is cast as the most provocative form of political resis-
tance thoroughly suffused by a passionate humanitarianism. It is not by acci-
dent that Anna Mauth in Dresden, the only one in the corrupt hospital who is
shown to truly live by the ideals of the medical profession, will switch political
and erotic allegiances after having been virtually killed by the Nazis, when she
is lined up next to the wife of a supposed deserter. With the exception of Hell-
mut Kehding, whose calls for holding the military command of Die Gustloff
accountable go nowhere and thus prefigure the necessity of war-crimes trials,
the untainted figures who presage the spirit of a new era are predominantly
women. Thus the new generational imaginary put in place pays homage to
the emancipatory—but ideologically suspect—rhetoric that “the hour of the
woman” has finally arrived. Following this phantasmagoric imperative, women
are often positioned as exculpatory figures—yet they are exempted from the
imperative, as the films are shown to leave behind or bury those masculinities
that are too identified with the old order: Harald Kehding in Die Gustloff, who
is washed away as the ship sinks; Rüdiger Graf von Gernstorff in March of
Millions, who commits suicide, but only after he has endorsed Lena as the
generational heir to his legacy.
These figures of a postmemorial time, however, also embody stark warn-
ings, such as young Fritz, a Hitler youth in March of Millions, who spouts Nazi
rhetoric to pledge his undying love to the Führer, a father figure Fritz is unwill-
ing to renounce. Fritz comes to embody the very real threat of the neo-Nazi
movement to unravel the fragile and carefully staged dream of national and
transnational reconciliation the docudramas seek to instantiate. As the docu-
dramas insert themselves into ongoing debates on, for example, Erika Stein-
bach’s vision of a “Center against Expulsions” (Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen),
the projected reconciliation seems much more tenuous and tentative—at best a
work in progress whose democratic promise still needs to be tested. The ques-
tion of how these docudramas represent a critical intervention into these
debates over World War II memory will undoubtedly persist. Despite reserva-
tions, we need to acknowledge that we have arrived at a third-generation mode
of filmmaking that has created an opening and that may facilitate productive
exchanges between, for example, public memory and the resilient forces of
private memory. It is not trivial that the docudramas may have contributed to
family dinner conversations that otherwise would not have taken place, thus
speaking to television’s democratic potential. They have also helped restore
cinematic pleasure to the representation of this chapter in German history, in
that watching such TV docudramas is no longer exclusively an exercise in
84   Televising Tainted History

atonement or a working through of the legacy of historical guilt. Instead, they

provide a televisual occasion for open-ended and ongoing national and trans-
national conversations about this tainted history that otherwise might have
ended up on recruitment posters for the right wing.
The new temporal and cultural location of these docudramas necessi-
tates that these conversations extend to reassessing what the question of cri-
tique means for the long-standing moral imperative and interpretative predom-
inance of the guilt-and-shame paradigm. A persistent challenge is how to make
thinkable German civilians as both perpetrators and victims—that is, as both
complicit with the crimes of the Nazi regime and subject to the catastrophic
effects of its policies and the resulting war. It is important to bring these
historical and historically specific differentiations to bear on the very ques-
tion about how to represent the tainted histories of bombardment and expul-
sion in nonrevisionist and nonexculpatory ways. To be sure, the very frame-
work of what it means to lay claim to the status of victim as a German is
overdetermined—and continually stretched to its limits by ideologically sus-
pect cultural productions (such as Friedrich’s Fire). This said, the debate over
how German civilians were at once perpetrators and victims needs to be
ongoing. One central question is now: what kinds of claims will be attached
to the recognition of “victim status,” and what larger political and ideologi-
cal platforms will be served by such recognition? The very process of critique
necessitates stepping outside politically convenient practices to reconsider and
invent anew the conceptual frameworks that will shape today’s and tomorrow’s
generational time of memory.
Televising Tainted History: Recent TV Docudrama (Dresden, March of

Millions, Die Gustloff) and the Charge of Revisionism

Elke Heckner

In the latest effort to publicly reclaim the German experience of displacement

and bombardment toward the end of the Nazi period, the TV docudramas

Dresden (2006), March of Millions (2007), and Die Gustloff (2008) have

articulated a new set of rules of cinematic engagement for the tainted war

experience of German civilians. This article explores the tensions between

the new televisuality of German suffering and the persisting charge of

revisionism leveled by some journalists and scholars at the blockbuster TV

docudramas. Drawing on Aleida Assmann’s deconstruction of the seemingly

irreconcilable opposition between invocations of German wartime suffering

and expiation of war guilt, the article shows that these charges do not

account for the new frameworks of filmic representation, which specifically

challenge the revisionist legacy. By examining the possibilities and limits of

this televisuality for critical approaches to history and film, the article argues

that the docudramas are engaged in rewriting the old generational contract,

which until recently was tacitly bound by the guilt-and-shame paradigm, and

in creating democratic mythologies and the ethos of reconciliation.

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