Blockbuster Geschichte

In the organizer's words:

Whether in video games, pop songs or blockbusters: history is no longer only told in books and thus reaches an audience of millions. But how much entertainment can the culture of remembrance take? Writer Max Czollek and historian Stefanie Samida discuss with Anh Tran, podcast host of Der Rest ist Geschichte.

How do you negotiate history in pop culture media for a mass audience?

Ever since the German premiere of the TV series Holocaust in 1979, the question of moral boundaries in the popularization of history has been part of the debate about "the right way to remember".

In Fortnite, the most popular video game of all time, gamers re-enact the 1963 March on Washington of the American civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King.

The video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z's single "Apeshit", shot in the Louvre in Paris in 2018, is peppered with art historical allusions. The two appear in front of icons of Western art, in a museum whose works partly originate from imperial raids, and performatively "hijack" one of the central places of Western high culture and white cultural heritage.

In this country, the writer Max Czollek criticized the ritualization of remembrance as a "theater of reconciliation". Does the pop-cultural examination of history evade the accusation of coming to terms with the past or is it part of it? Max Czollek talks to historian Stefanie Samida about the possibilities and limits of depicting history in pop culture media.

Anh Tran, podcast host of Der Rest ist Geschichte, will moderate.

Guests

• Max Czollek, is author and co-editor of the magazine Jalta - Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart and curator of the Coalition for a Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD) for a pluralistic culture of remembrance. Since 2023 he has moderated the discussion series at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. In 2024 he was DAAD Distinguished Chair in Contemporary Poetics at New York University, NYU. His books of poetry are published by Verlagshaus Berlin, his essays by Carl Hanser Munich.
• Stefanie Samida is a research associate at the Department of History at the University of Heidelberg and a lecturer in Popular Cultures at the ISEK - Institute for Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. She is a professor of administration at the Institute for Material Culture at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and conducts research in the fields of public history, popular cultures/everyday cultures, cultural heritage and material culture.

Moderation

• Anh Tran is a journalist and presenter born and raised in Dresden as a descendant of Vietnamese contract workers. She explored her struggles with home in the podcast 'Auf Heimatsuche'. She loves to live out her interest in history and stories in the Deutschlandfunk podcast 'Der Rest ist Geschichte'.

Price information:

Registration from October 30