ABSTRACT
It will have been hard for Germans not to have taken notice between 1990 and 1998 of the debates relating to the National Socialist past. They were closely followed by the media, indeed the media were one of the main actors in these debates, which, as this book sets out to demonstrate, accompanied and indeed symptomized the post-unification shift towards a less blinkered understanding of the Third Reich. Thus historians and journalists in German newspapers had begun to debate Goldhagen’s book before it had even been published in German translation, drawing public attention to it. Debates between Goldhagen and German historians were televised, and in part organized by television networks. There were countless news bulletins on the ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ exhibition. Western German Radio (WDR) even based a crime thriller in the popular Scene of the Crime (Tatort) series around the exhibition; it was broadcast in June 1998. A flood of television programmes accompanied the 50th anniversary of 8 May 1945. The German television media to this day provide a wide range of programmes not just on the theme of coming to terms with National Socialism, but on the Third Reich itself. Indeed hardly a day passes without a programme on the period. The week’s television programme at the time of writing will serve as an example. Thus on 28 October 2000, between 10 p.m. and midnight, the private channel VOX showed two hours of colour film of the Second World War. This was just one sequence in a series-The Colour of War-which VOX has been sharing with SAT1. On 30 October 2000, at 11 p.m., WDR ran a programme entitled ‘Monaco under the Swastika’, while on 1 November, the third part of the series Holokaust (whose makers rejected the usual spelling Holocaust as too ‘anglicized’) was shown at peak viewing time, 9 p.m., on Germany’s ZDF (Second German Television Channel).
