ABSTRACT
Journalism must be up to date. Yesterday’s newspaper is older than anything else.
When looking for a binary code to delimit the social system of journalism (Blo¨baum, 1994)
from its environment, some theorists go as far as to say that topicality is the characteristic
which distinguishes journalistic information from information in general. Does this mean
that journalists should not report the past? Are historical topics a journalistic taboo just
because topicality is obviously one of the most important journalistic qualities (Po¨ttker,
These questions are already answered when we consider what topicality really
means. A well-known definition says: it is not what is happening today but what is relevant
today, that is topical. Relevant for the public, we should add. And, of course, the past can
be equally relevant for the present-day public especially when it is problematic. For
example, the National Socialist (NS) past is still particularly problematic because of the
nature and the extent of the crimes committed in it. The German historian Christian Meier
has recently demonstrated that the continuing public commemoration of Auschwitz
breaks with thousands of years of experience in mastering a bad past by forgetting, simply
because the incredible gravity of this violation of civilisation does not permit us to
suppress or forget (Meier, 2010). If journalism, obedient to the rules of topicality, were to
ignore the NS-past, its terrible consequences as well as its genesis, it would shirk the
responsibility of remembering what, in this case, cannot be dismissed.
