Media and National Identity: Reinvention of the Nation

The concept of reinvention of the nation and its history through the media is crucial for understanding the representation of the Holocaust in today’s Germany. Waisbord covers some important aspects of this concept. The author states that “the power of the media lies in making national feelings normal on an everyday basis” (Waisbord, 2004, p. 386). He points out that “in devoting attention to historical events, selecting news frames, or producing content to represent national sentiments, the media shape the cultural repertoire used to define nationhood”  (Waisbord, 2004, p. 386). Thus, media have a significant influence on constructing public discourse on the cultural and historical issues. Media and education are the ways to store the past and reconstruct or reinvent it.

Nations appeal to a sense of stored memories passed from generation to generation. They are based on the idea of a historical continuity between past and present. To accomplish this, nations need institutions that permanently remind members of their commonality. Like educational systems, official calendars, and state rituals, the media store cultural elements that come to define nationhood.  (Waisbord, 2004, p. 387)

Waisbord summarizes his research on the subject by saying that “the media are one of those institutions that contribute to maintaining feelings of national membership... Media can equally act as a source of exclusion and murder in the name of the nation or as an ally of civic patriotism. Both possibilities are similarly viable, particularly in societies where patriotism is a contested, contradictory notion used to justify aggression and compassion, war and democracy.”  (Waisbord, 2004, p. 387)

Waisbord's findings suggest several key implications for our case. First, the communication power of the media to shape the culture by selecting and framing certain information may lead to the re-creation or re-construction of the history of a nation. Therefore, any regular distortion or bias in the media coverage of the Holocaust will inevitably lead to the distorted image of the nation and its history, nationally and internationally. Also, we need to take into consideration the fact that a strong national identity is only built when it is done on an everyday basis and is strongly embedded into regular public discourses.

The issue of mass media products distorting the information about the Holocaust is becoming more and more sensitive and acute. Professor Alejandro Baer explains this occurrence in “Consuming history and memory through mass media products:” “The debate on the representation of the history and memory of the Holocaust – the paradigmatic example of limitations and imperatives to representational practice – has become a contemporary battlefield regarding the legitimacy and propriety of mass media products” (Baer, 2001). The concept of representing the past through the ‘culture industry’ was introduced by the Frankfurt School.

Baer mentions several main critics and optimists of this concept. Critics (Adorno, Hartman, Jameson) are concerned with the impact of TV dramas and Hollywood films on public memory. They are worried that these films resemble advertising or are “alienated from personal and active recollection, falling prey to the effects of ‘information sickness’ in a world turned into a vast accumulation of images, which have lost their referential value” (Baer, 2001). The optimists argue that “an inevitable vulgarization was always preferable to indifference and silence, and the culture industry did awaken an interest in people who were previously ignorant of many important historical events.” He describes the ways in which Holocaust is represented in the media. The NBC television miniseries Holocaust (1979) has been fervently criticized and called “an example of obscene trivialization of the Holocaust in popular culture,” especially by survivors. Another controversial media product on the  Holocaust was Art Spiegelman’s comic book Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.

“First censored as a superficial and tasteless American product, it was belatedly considered by     the audience and some critics to be even more authentic and convincing than those ‘factual’ projects which aimed to represent the suffering of the Holocaust survivors.”

Among some of the famous examples of the Holocaust representation in media, Baer mentions Roberto Benigni’s tragic-comic Holocaust fable, Life is Beautiful, and the Hollywood-style dramatization of the Jewish genocide Schindler’s List.

“Schindler’s List has also shown that the culture industry is capable of preserving (or reintroducing) the events of the Holocaust in the collective memory and historical consciousness        of globalized audiences Moreover, the film was very effective in defining the shape and dominant imagery of that memory.” (Loshitzky, 1997).

This film is an example of the new memory and symbols constructed by the media. Its original soundtrack, for instance, is used in various Holocaust commemoration ceremonies all over the world. There are also three documentary films produced by the Shoah Foundation – Survivors

of the Holocaust (1996), The Lost Children of Berlin (1997), and the Academy Award-winning film The Last Days (1998).  “All of them weave together survivor testimonies with archival footage, personal photographs and artifacts, which is a well-established documentary film practice. But montage, composition of images and choices of characters emphasize identification, drama and explicitness.”

            Baer concludes his overview by stating that, in contemporary society, “mass media, history and memory do not exist within neatly defined boundaries.”  They overlap and influence each other. Instead of debating about truth or falsehood of the history represented in the media, he recommends focusing on analyzing their “far-reaching impact on the historical knowledge and memorial imagery of an increasingly globalized public.”