1 - Depicting Returnees: Contested Media Representations in East and West Germany

Summary

Memory and Media Representations

IN 1999 THE GERMAN TELEVISION STATION Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF; Second German Television) broadcast the documentary series 100 Jahre: Die großen Bilder des 20. Jahrhunderts (100 Years: The Great Images of the Twentieth Century). The episodes of the series depicted the most famous, most emotional, and most important aspects of the twentieth century. Along with events such as the outbreak of the two world wars, the landing on the moon, and the Cuban missile crisis, ZDF regarded the return of the last German POWs from Soviet war captivity in 1955/56 as a central episode in the history of the twentieth century. This certainly reflects the feelings of many German families, to whom the return of the last POWs from Russia either meant knowledge of the survival of the beloved father and husband or the certainty that he would never return. The documentary focuses on this particular emotional moment of the return of the last German POWs to West Germany, not mentioning how those last returnees were welcomed in the GDR. In addition to this particular example, there are many other East and West German mass-media examples throughout the postwar decades that provide various representations of German returnees from war captivity.

What kinds of stories were taken up in public mass-media representations of the past? Why were there specific narrative patterns that continually reappeared, while other stories were never told in the mass media? In which ways did these media representations correspond to or contradict more personal stories told by returnees themselves? How did collective representatives of returnees, for instance veterans’ associations, exert an influence on those narratives told in the mass media? And how did returnees themselves respond to those publicly propagated versions of their past and of their fates? In this chapter I explore the manifold ways in which returnees were represented in the mass media in East and West Germany before and after reunification. I analyze how these representations were shaped by changing political and ideological circumstances, by media strategies, by genre-specific characteristics of the media, and by the direct involvement of returnees.