The Holocaust through the Prism of East German Television: Collective Memory and Audience Perceptions

Abstract

��� The German Democratic Republic never took the same responsibility for Holocaust memory as the Federal Republic of Germany. East Germans learned relatively little about the Holocaust thorough their popular culture. East Germans were less likely to identify the Holocaust as a critical piece of German history than West Germans, but by examining the muted narrative of the Holocaust that did appear on East German television, this article also shows how East Germans came to have a distinct collective memory of the Holocaust, notwithstanding their viewing of West German television. The following makes use of rarely cited viewer surveys, which offer unique insights into what East Germans thought about the programs they watched. It is a generally accepted fact that East Germans never experienced the same confrontation with the Holocaust that their West German counterparts did prior to the reunification of Germany in 1990, in large part because the official state anti-fascism celebrated almost exclusively the suffering and struggle of the communist resistance fighters. 1 When official state discourse did engage the Holocaust, it was interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of Marxist class analysis, which stated that antisemitism was only a diversionary tactic of the ruling class to distract the workers from the class struggle and revolution. We also know that East Germans regularly participated vicariously in West German political and cultural developments via frequent watching of West German television. Archival documents show that during the early 1970s between 50% and 78% of prime-time viewers directed their attention to the West. 2 The German historian Lutz Niethammer suggested in the 1980s that this dual access to Germany’s difficult past may have led East Germans to a more differentiated view of National Socialism. 3 Yet, unlike the West Germans, the East Germans lacked an open public space within which to discuss their views. Thus, although many East Germans certainly watched the American television series Holocaust when it was broadcast in the West, 4 they were not able to participate in the same wide-ranging public discussions that immediately followed. Nor were they able to participate in the sustained public Holocaust discussions in the West during the 1980s, which took place on television and radio, in the print media, and also in the cinema. 5 One result of this was that East Germans appeared much less likely to