From Contemporary Witness to Professional Actor Strategies of Personalizing History on TV at the Epochal Threshold of the 21st Century

在21世纪初，传授历史的媒体似乎走到了一个十字路口：随着国家社会主义的当代见证者的死亡，专业演员取而代之。他们将消失的证人本身和他们传达的信息进行艺术呈现，从而收回越来越多具有大众吸引力的解释主导地位-并被社会授予这一特权。第一份清单展示了当今常用的四种个性化策略：使用下一代证人，在纪录片中重演，当代证人证词的艺术上演，以及在故事片中将历史话题戏剧化。目前，我们无法就观众对这些呈现方式的看法发表有效的声明。因此，研究子项目将分析历史传授从当代见证者到演员的划时代门槛变化的条件，特别是影响。通过分析国家社会主义时代的电视电影，并特别关注各自使用的个性化策略，我们旨在探索东德和西德以及奥地利的青少年如何感知关于肇事者和受害者的信息，并将它们融入他们对意义和生活世界的视野中。这项定性研究将历史学方法和媒体研究方法结合起来，将在总括项目：媒体社会中的历史传播室的框架内建立一个知识库，该项目也可作为媒体行业未来的专门知识。

At the beginning of the 21st century, the media impartment of history seems to have reached a crossroads: With the dying of contemporary witnesses to National Socialism, professional actors take their places. They render an artistic presentation of the vanished witnesses themselves and their messages and thereby reclaim more and more of an interpretive dominance with mass appeal - and are granted this prerogative by society.A first inventory displays four strategies of personalization which are commonly used today: The use of witnesses of the next generation, re-enactment in documentaries, the artistic staging of contemporary witness testimonials, and the dramatization of historical topics in feature films. At present, we cannot make valid statements about how these modes of presentation are perceived by the viewers. The research sub-project will therefore analyze the conditions and especially the effects of the change in history impartment at the epochal threshold from contemporary witness to actor. By analyzing TV movies about the time of National Socialism and with special focus on the respective personalization strategies used, we aim to explore how adolescents in Eastern and Western Germany as well as in Austria perceive messages about perpetrators and victims and integrate them into their horizons of meaning and lifeworlds. With this qualitative study, which synergetically interconnects methods of historiography and media studies, a knowledge base shall be developed within the frame of the umbrella project: History Impartment in the Media Society, which might also serve as future expertise for the media industry.