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，媒体对历史的影响似乎已经到了一个十字路口：随着当代国家社会主义见证者的死亡，专业演员取代了他们的位置。他们以艺术的方式呈现了消失的证人本身及其信息，从而越来越多地重新获得了具有大众吸引力的解释主导地位-并且被社会授予了这种特权。第一个清单显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舞台，以及故事片中历史题材的戏剧化。目前，我们还不能对观众如何感知这些呈现方式做出有效的陈述。因此，该研究子项目将分析条件，特别是在从当代证人到演员的时代门槛上的历史变化的影响。通过分析国家社会主义时期的电视电影，并特别关注各自使用的个性化策略，我们的目标是探索青少年在东部和西部德国以及在奥地利如何看待犯罪者和受害者的信息，并将其融入他们的意义和生活世界的视野。通过这种定性研究，它协同互连史学和媒体研究的方法，知识库将在伞式项目的框架内开发：媒体社会的历史印象，这也可能成为媒体行业未来的专业知识。

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.