Public History in European Perspectives
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Edited by:
Thomas Cauvin
One of the primary missions of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) is to be a key player in public history. With the launch of its new book series, Public History in European Perspectives, the C2DH wants to serve as a platform for public history, exploring its potential as an interdisciplinary field and a means of fostering and reflecting upon public engagement, dissemination and participatory practices in areas such as heritage-making, modes of display, and historical storytelling.
(Public) historians, scholars in material culture studies, communication studies and museum studies, curators and archivists are invited to submit proposals on the methodological foundations of disseminating historical knowledge in the broadest sense, on interactions with public audiences, and on the epistemological consequences of mediation, remediation, and intermediation. It is critical to encourage work on ethical issues in the field of public history, on the cultural but also political, social and economic consequences of public history projects, on working with minority groups and establishing more inclusive agendas for community engagement.
The editorial board members for the book series are renowned experts in the field and ensure outstanding quality by acting as peer reviewers and advisors to the series editor. The book series is trilingual (English, French and German) and offers options for open access.
Topics
Scripting Genocide traces the history of how and why the Wannsee Conference has repeatedly attracted the attention of American, British, and German artists, writers, and filmmakers since 1960. Almost all of their televisual depictions of the conference itself are sparse, minimalist, dialogue-driven productions. Their subtle, almost scholarly projection of the conference stands in stark contrast to the large-scale and often critically acclaimed attention devoted to other aspects of the Holocaust in both big-budget theatrical films and European art cinema.
Scripting Genocide investigates how the dramatic, fictionalized depictions of the Wannsee Conference offered filmmakers, and especially screenwriters, opportunities to be public historians. This book also contains the final interviews with screenwriters Paul Mommertz and Loring Mandel. Following the methods of the New Film History, which is grounded in archival production material, oral history interviews, and screenplay analysis, this book asks why and how filmmakers have grappled with portraying Wannsee in dramatic form since the 1960s. Each of these docudramas contributed to a diffuse body of work the author conceptualizes as "antifascist television." In the end, all of these productions argue that words prefigure deeds.
This volume introduces key terms of public history and makes them accessible via the most important subject areas and central research perspectives. It is aimed at students, teachers and practitioners who deal with history in the public sphere and offers approaches to the theoretical foundation of public history as part of historical cultural studies.
