European television became an important national and gradually also transnational cultural factor after 1950. This book is about how central themes and events of twentieth-century European history have been reflected and mediated in historical documentaries, docudramas and different genres of historical drama in the UK and Germany during this period. Focusing on comparing historical dramas from these two countries with rather different national histories allows for a broader and deeper analysis of drama cases, and at the same time the two countries illustrate the diversity of Europe. Throughout the book and in each of the chapters dealing with historical drama, I draw on what historians have said about tendencies in Europe as a whole. I deal with the hopeful expectations and the slow descent into war between 1900 and 1918; with the chaotic years between 1920 and 1945 resulting in the catastrophic WW2 that changed Europe for ever; with the post-war period 1945–1989 with the Cold War, the rise of the welfare state and the cultural revolution of the 1960s; and with the new united Europe after 1989.
Most of the historical drama cases I deal with from the two countries were made after 1980, but some are from the late 1960s. In general, historical dramas in the UK and Germany—and in the rest of Europe—grew in numbers and popularity between 1960 and 2020, and European co-production became more important. While the focus in the book is on historical drama in Germany and the UK, I have included a chapter on the broader context of historical drama in Europe (Chapter 3). Here I argue for similarities and differences between Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and Western and Northern Europe, and for why the focus on Germany and UK is more than a comparative study of two nations. The study of the past is also a study of the present. Historical dramas from Germany and the UK reflect a development in our understanding of the past, and they also speak to the present context where they were made.
Our Embodied Mind and Mediated Cultural Encounters
It is part of the generic DNA of historical drama (fictional and documentary) that it looks back on the past from a more contemporary perspective. In forms of contemporary historical drama, the distance between the past and the present represented may be quite short; in other forms of historical drama that deal with more distant parts of our past, the distance can be quite long. But it is obvious that history, whether the recent or distant past, fascinates us. The past is not just about the national past—although understanding that is fascinating in itself. It is also about our own personal history, because our past is important for our present understanding of ourselves. As I argue in Chapter 2, memory is an integral part of our embodied mind, and linking our individual memory to a larger and more collective understanding of the past helps us form and develop our self. As cognitive theories of the embodied mind clearly tell us, our autobiographical self is very active and central in connection with historical drama. This is where mental links between the individual level, social group level and more universal dimensions are combined and interact.
Our basic way of experiencing the world is not just influenced and constructed by the national and cultural context in which we live. There are universal schemas, cognitive and emotional, that transcend national differences and make it possible for us to understand historical drama from other countries. There are basic features of genres and narratives, basic human emotions and experiences we all share that interact in a dynamic way with new experiences, among them TV drama from other countries. In this book, a cognitive and embodied theory of memory and historical drama is combined with a more socio-cultural theory of national and transnational mediated cultural encounters (Bondebjerg et al. 2017: 23ff). Our embodied mind is flexible, it constantly interacts with the reality we live in and new experiences we acquire: national historical television drama results in cognitive and emotional experiences for the audiences, and sometimes also in public debate. The argument behind the analysis of the selected cases of historical drama in Europe is that they shape the memory not just of national citizens, but also of other Europeans. Watching historical drama from other European countries helps us bridge differences and understand other Europeans better. In the coming chapters we also discuss the reception of selected series—not systematically, but only when debate has been extensive and divisive.
An Age of Extremes
The British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994) simply calls his book on this century The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. He tells the story of the century in three parts: “The Age of Catastrophe”, which covers the immense destruction and chaos of two world wars, the Soviet revolution and a profound world crisis; “The Golden Age”, with the miraculous transformation and development of affluent societies in most of Western Europe; and “The Landslide”, with the end of the Cold War, but also new challenges of a demographic and ecological nature, at the heart of which is Europe’s role and place in a changed global world. According to Hobsbawm, the two world wars killed millions of people and destroyed the European empires existing before 1914. The wars created a whole new map of Europe, a continent of nation states. But perhaps even more importantly and surprisingly, the catastrophes paved the way for social and cultural revolutions that changed everyday life for ordinary Europeans:
How did the world of the 1990s compare with the world of 1914? It contained over six billion human beings, perhaps three times as many people as at the outbreak of the First World War…. A recent estimate of the century’s megadeaths … is 197 millions, which is the equivalent of more than one in ten of the total world population in 1900 …. Most people until the 1980s lived better than their parents, and, in the advanced economies, better than they had ever expected to live or even imagined it possible to live … humanity was far better educated … the world was filled with revolutionary and constantly advancing technologies … a revolution in transport and communications which virtually annihilated time and distance. (Hobsbawm 1994: 12)
Hobsbawm is an engaged and excellent historian, and his portrait of the twentieth century is one of the key texts used in this book to understand the main structures influencing societies and people’s lives in this period. The documentaries, docudramas and fictional dramas often tell us another story, a story that tries to reconstruct how people living through historical periods and dramatic events thought and felt. Here we get closer to an attempt to combine macro-history and micro-history, the forces and structures behind historical events and changes, and the way people lived their everyday life. One of the themes running through this book is how television drama reflects history from below and from above.
At the Dawn of a New Century
The new century was celebrated in Paris that year. The World Fair (April–November 1900) was an impressive exhibition with more than 24 countries from Europe and the rest of the world represented. The exhibition was spread over 536 acres of land, and when it closed it had been visited by almost 50 million people. The intention of the exhibition was to demonstrate the power of Western European culture and technology, but there was also a certain cosmopolitan dimension. It was a splendid and colossal demonstration of European colonialism and technology. Electricity and other technologies were on display: the power of industrialism and its machines, and the potential behind electricity was demonstrated in the Palace of Industry with its 5000 light bulbs (Kershaw 2015: 11). It was a powerful display of the civilizational aspects of technology, a technology that just 14 years later would show its destructive forces. As Kershaw points out, this must have been a dazzling show for the elites and middle classes from all over the world of especially Europe and its prosperous future and present power. However, the vast majority of Europeans lived in a quite different reality, an agricultural world of villages and small towns with very little comfort, or near industrial centres, also with very poor living conditions.
Historians analyze the past, but what did people think about the coming century as the clocks turned on 1 January 1900? How did newspapers around Europe greet the century on behalf of their readers? I take articles from three big European nations (England, Germany and France) and from a small Scandinavian nation (Denmark). Newspapers have different ideological leanings, so this cannot be said to be representative of these countries, but at least the examples can give us a feel of how some of the major newspapers looked at the new century. The huge class differences at the beginning of the new century were, in different ways, present in the way newspapers greeted the new century. However, the British conservative The Times in its leading article (1 January 1901) did not focus much on class differences, but on the pride of being British and of belonging to a great nation:
The twentieth century has dawned upon us; and as we float past this quiet landmark on the shores of time feelings of awe and wonder naturally creep over us. To Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, the first of all considerations must be – how will the new century affect the moral and material greatness of their country and of their Empire? The auguries are not unpropitious. We enter upon the new century with a heritage of achievement and of glory older, more continuous, and not less splendid than that of any other nation in the world. Our national character has … lost nothing of its virility and doggedness when put to the proof of war … We have a reasonable trust that England and her sons will emerge triumphant from that ordeal at the end of the Twentieth Century … and that then and for ages to come they will live and prosper, one united and Imperial people, to be ‘a bulwark for the cause of men’. (The Times quoted by Donald Read 1973: 10–11)
The conservative voice of England in 1901 was clearly pretending to be the voice of a whole nation, but it was a national voice representing the imperial classes. It was also a nation that in many ways became a bulwark for democracy and civilization during two world wars, but also a nation whose national past and heritage as an empire was lost.
In Germany the new century was already greeted on the last day of 1899 and the first days of 1900. Berliner Morgenpost (31 December 1899), a centre-right newspaper with certain progressive tendencies, had a leading article on the front page and a poem with the title “Zur Jahrhundertwende (On the turn of the century)”. The poem tries to give voice to different class representatives and people with different educational backgrounds: the worker, the patriot, the philosopher, the apostle of peace, the electro technician, the mathematician, the child and ‘the reality’. Each of these voices have their own visions and ideas. The worker, for instance, claims that other centuries have raised hopes, but not much change, so why should this new century be any better? The electro technician on the other hand claims that the new technology will change the world as happens in fairy tales. The leading article, however, points to the main task of achieving peace among the nations of Europe, and gives Germany a central task and role in this project. Where The Times spoke on behalf of an empire and mostly saluted that empire and its leading nation, there is more at stake in Berliner Morgenpost:
We wish most of all political and social reforms that can lead us towards the big project of peace and collaboration between classes and nations. No country in the world can wish this more than our dear Germany. No nation among the European countries can want this more at the time of a new century than the German people. Much is still to be done to reach our goal ...