Entertainment and remembrance culture

Bestselling video games, blockbuster movies or cultural heritage negotiated in pop music: history is not only told in and with books. Can, is and has the representation of history in pop cultural media been more than a mere ‘theatre of reconciliation’? Which possibilities of intervention in existing historical narratives were and are used in pop cultural media to challenge common ideas about our past? Anh Tran, podcast host of Der Rest ist Geschichte, talked about these questions with author Max Czollek and historian Stefanie Samida.

How do we talk about history in pop culture media for mass audiences?

Ever since the German premiere of the TV series Holocaust in 1979, the question of moral boundaries and the popularisation of history has been part of the debate about a ‘right way to remember’.

In Fortnite, the most popular video game of all time, gamers re-enact the 1963 march on Washington by the American civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King.

The video for Beyonce and Jay-Z’s single ‘Apeshit’, shot in the Louvre in Paris in 2018, is peppered with art historical allusions. The two appear in front of icons of Western art, in a museum whose works partly originate from imperial raids, and performatively ‘hijack’ one of the central places of Western high culture and white cultural heritage.

We asked ourselves: does pop-cultural confrontation with history evade the accusation of coming to terms with the past or is it part of it?

The debates that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s using the example of the Holocaust series have by no means lost their explosive force. Today, there are a number of blockbuster formats in new pop-cultural media, above all in the field of video games, which trigger similar discussions. In August last year, “Voices of the Forgotten” went online in Fortnite – a Fortnite environment in which players visit a Holocaust museum and learn more about the Holocaust via oral history. More than 400 million people play Fortnite regularly, and the TV series “Holocaust” was watched by 20 million Germans. This corresponds to 50 per cent of the population at the time.

With this in mind, Max Czollek and Stefanie Samida not only discussed methods of communicating history, Adorno’s premises and the experiential content of so-called historical re-enactments – examples given were preceded by questions about the possibilities and opportunities of fiction. How do we deal with gaps in archives? How do we remember voices that can no longer tell their own stories? How does an audience perceive pop-cultural constructions of history?

It can be said that pop culture is playing an increasingly important role in making history more accessible and more vivid for a wide audience. However, historical narratives are not neutral, but always reflect certain perspectives and can have gaps or distortions. However, the emotionalisation and personalisation of history also harbours the risk of undue simplification or instrumentalisation, especially in a political context – because narratives often serve to construct national identity: with regard to German remembrance culture in particular, Czollek emphasises the mechanisms that link memory work and self-construction.

Our panel considered the use of fiction in the communication of history to be rewarding in order to fill gaps and illuminate perspectives that would otherwise remain invisible. At the same time, the need for a pluralistic culture of remembrance was emphasised, which takes into account different voices and narratives instead of reproducing dominant narratives. Overall, there were calls for pop culture to be actively integrated into history-telling, although it is necessary to critically scrutinise which stories are told and which perspectives are included or excluded.