Nazis, Viewers and Statistics: Television History, Television Audience Research and Collective Memory in West Germany

As the most important medium of memory, German television has refracted intellectual debates about the burden of the past and influenced the popular perception of nazism for generations of viewers since the 1960s. However, limited access to archives and intellectual prejudice have so far prevented a full appreciation of television's role in the evolution of German collective memory. This article addresses this gap in the scholarship on contemporary Germany by taking a closer look at the historical coverage broadcast by the West German public television station ZDF between 1963 and 1993. In the course of our analysis the development of the contents of three decades of programming on the history of the Third Reich is linked to the available qualitative and quantitative television reception data for the same period. The evidence suggests that West German viewers were quite interested in the history of nazism and the second world war. With the exception of the mid-1970s there is no indication that the audience systematically avoided the historical coverage of the ZDF. But the data also indicates that this surprising willingness to engage with the burden of the past reflects significant changes in media content and political disposition. In the 1960s, television recycled the apologetic plot structures of West Germany's postwar historical culture. As a result, the programmes all but ignored the Holocaust and provided a very schematic, self-serving image of the past for the benefit of viewers who had themselves experienced the Third Reich. In the 1980s a more complex and self-critical vision of the nazi past appeared on the screen and was appreciated by a more diverse audience, including a majority of viewers who shared no personal responsibility for the crimes of the regime. But even the improved programming of the 1980s for the most part avoided any direct confrontation with the perpetrators and bystanders of the 'Final Solution'.