The Politics of Empathy

Abstract

Media coverage of the 60th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy (2004) took a lot of interest in the fact that state representatives of Germany and Russia — Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Premier Vladimir Putin — had for the first time been invited to take part in the official remembrance celebrations. Far less controversial was the fact that Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg sat among the heads of state and veterans as official guests. Not only have the battle scenes in their collaborative Hollywood projects such as Saving Private Ryan (US 1998, dir. Steven Spielberg) and Band of Brothers (US 2001, dir. Tom Hanks et al., prod. Steven Spielberg) been praised by veterans as ‘authentic’ (Walker 2004: 123), but this seal of approval also means that they are perceived to have successfully transferred the memories of veterans to the screen for audiences around the world to witness and to experience. Their presence at the commemoration ceremony was a clear signal that the veterans and the organizers of the event had endorsed the film Saving Private Ryan as a vindication of ‘their’ war, as a life-like record of the soldiers’ experience and as an authentic representation of their memories. The film not only emulates the real-time reporting of war photography and footage (Walker 2004: 124) — key episodes were shot in the grainy style of the 16mm colour film used in the 1940s (Westwell 2006: 76/92) — but in parts aims to induce in viewers a visceral sense of disorientation and concussion as experienced by soldiers in combat. Some of the non-realistic effects, such as slow motion, are supposed to convey inner experientiality and make viewers feel immersed in the horrors of D-Day. In Hirsch’s words, ‘cinema constitutes a kind of witnessing to both the outer, physical reality of historical events and the inner, psychological reality of the effects of those events on people’ (Hirsch 2004: 6). Viewers are not only given the impression that they are part of the action, they are also equipped with ready-made memories of the events.