(Re)constructing biographies: German television docudrama and the historical biography

Abstract

Television as public mediator of the past depicts various aesthetic and narrative strategies to communicate history. One major trend is the tendency to merge narrative forms from documentary and fiction to historical docudramas. ‘Hybridization’, ‘blurring boundaries’ and ‘porosity’ are frequently used terms to describe what happens when historical events are re-enacted on television. Television docudrama thereby has become one of the most important genres to represent history on the small screen. This tendency is closely related to a changing understanding of history, which is characteristic not only of the media but for historiography in general. The questioning of the narrative modes used to represent history has caused specific aesthetic reactions. The combination of documents, re-enactments and eyewitness testimonies are one result of significant methodological and epistemological shifts in historiography. Methods such as oral history as well as a change in the conception of memory towards more personal and fragmentary access to the past support changing attention granted to everyday life and ordinary people.