Uses of the Past in Refugee Documentaries in Sweden and Germany

Abstract

Migration not only entangles people, cultures and societies but also histories and memories of diverse groups across national and cultural boundaries. The article focuses on mediated memory cultures of migration both theoretically and empirically. The first part discusses how cultural memories of migration in cross-medial flows of remediation can entangle ‘mnemonic imaginations’ of diverse groups within societies across time, cultures and media. In response to the conceptual framework of ‘entangled media histories’ this theoretical part explores entangled media histories of migration from the angle of memory studies. The second part of the article gives selected case studies. They reveal how media have historically mediated migratory memories and how they make use of this media history in contemporary productions. The examples are two Swedish documentary films of 2011 and 2015 and two German television documentaries of 2015 and 2016. With this theoretical and empirical approach the article shows how media actively contribute to debates about contemporary migration movements by the help of time-travelling migratory memory and media history.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee
• migration
• memory
• documentary
• Germany
• Sweden

Notes

1. Glynn and Kleist, Perceptions of Incorporation.

2. See Ahonen, “Europe and Refugees”; Scholz, “Willkommenskultur durch Schicksalsvergleich”; Seuferling, “Arrive Means Tell.”

3. Cronqvist and Hilgert, “Entangled Media Histories.”

4. Keightley and Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination.

5. Cf. Erll and Rigney, Dynamics of Cultural Memory; Glynn and Kleist, Perceptions of Incorporation.

6. Erll, “Travelling Memory.”

7. Ibid., 12.

8. Erll and Rigney, Dynamics of Cultural Memory.

9. Glynn and Kleist, Perceptions of Incorporation.

10. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

11. Gatrell, Making of Modern Refugee; Anderson, Us and Them.

12. See Chavez, The Latino Threat; Wilhelm, Migration, Memory, and Diversity.

13. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 2.

14. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”

15. Brunow, Remediating Transcultural Memory.

16. Radstone and Hodgkin, Regimes of Memory.

17. Brunow, Remediating Transcultural Memory.

18. See Figge and Michaelsen, “Ein Erbe gespenstischer Normalität.”

19. Peters, “Witnessing.”

20. Erll, “Travelling Memory.”

21. Erll and Rigney, Dynamics of Cultural Memory.

22. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media.

23. Keightley and Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination.

24. Ibid., 103.

25. Scholz, “Willkommenskultur durch Schicksalsvergleich.”

26. Ibid., 41.

27. Zelizer, “Photography, Journalism and Trauma,” 59–64.

28. Cronqvist and Hilgert, “Entangled Media Histories.”

29. Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 12.

30. Cronqvist and Hilgert, “Entangled Media Histories,” 132.

31. Terdiman, Modernity and Memory Crisis, 60.

32. The selection is based on a database survey undertaken by the author and by Sönke Treu at the NDR, Department ‘Dokumentation und Archive’. Research items like refugees, flight, history, memory, remembrance were triangulated. Between 1994 and 2018, 48 film productions by the Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) (North-German Broadcasting Corporation) were identified that explicitly make use of the past.

33. Viklund, Hoppets hamn.

34. All Swedish and German quotes are translated by the authors.

35. Scholz, “Willkommenskultur durch Schicksalsvergleich,” 42.

36. Introduction to Kriegskinder: Deutschland 1945. Syrien 2015. Broadcast: 17 December 2015.

37. Peters, “Witnessing,” 721.

38. Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 7.

39. Erll, Memory in Culture, 11.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hans-Ulrich Wagner

Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Leibniz-Institute for Media Research, Rothenbaumchaussee 36 Hamburg Deutschland (DEU) 20148, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

Philipp Seuferling

Philipp Seuferling, Media and Communication Studies, Södertörns högskola Institutionen för kultur och lärande, Alfred Nobels allé 7, Huddinge 141 89, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]