From Monday, older spectators can experience déjà vu. Forty years after the first broadcast on German television, the US series "Holocaust" is shown again. The fictive story tells on the one hand the example of the German-Jewish physician family Weiss all phases of the Nazi persecution and annihilation of social exclusion to death in the gas chamber in Auschwitz - and on the other side of the rise of the young Erik village unemployed to the influential SS man.

In January 1979, the series was a street sweeper with ratings of up to 40 percent and more than 20 million viewers. And she opened the eyes of the German society. Up until now, it had been concerned, if at all, only with the perpetrators, but little with the victims of the murder of the Jews. An unprecedented "Geschichtssturm" (Günter Anders) set off. Thousands of people turned to the broadcasters in letters, or telephoned on dedicated pay phones. Most expressed shame and horror; others, however, anti-Semitism, revisionism and denial of what happened.

"Holocaust" was an international success in 1978 and 1979, even beyond the USA and Germany. The film rights were sold to several dozen countries, including France, the Netherlands and Israel. Even if the film did not run in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, its indirect reception influenced even its memory culture.

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Series about Auschwitz: On the way to the memory consensus

The historian Frank Bösch interprets the worldwide distribution of the series as a "global turning point" that still shapes the present. Today, the destruction of European Jewry is considered the central fact of German history in the 20th century. The Holocaust is the cipher of the break of civilization in modern times worldwide; he is at the center of a globalized culture of remembrance.

All this has to do with the catalytic effect of the series. Even the contemporary observers saw "Holocaust" as an incision - also for the German history. The series title then established the previously common, but not unrivaled English term "Holocaust" for the destruction of European Jewry in the years 1933 to 1945.

BR was against "Holocaust" radiation

The series was controversial at its 1979 appearance. Politicians feared a loss of prestige for the Federal Republic abroad, when Germans appeared as mass killers worldwide on the screens. German broadcasters hesitated with the acquisition of the film rights, only the WDR showed interest. In particular, the BR resisted successfully against a broadcast of the series in the first.

Now the public-legal television of the Federal Republic missed the chance to the subsequent correction of a 40-year-old wrong decision. As in 1979, "Holocaust" runs on less attractive times only on channels of the third program, but not at prime time in the main program of the ARD. As praiseworthy as the broadcast by WDR, NDR and SWR is this Monday, it will not reach a large audience by midnight.

But there are also other reasons for a lack of resonance. The now 40-year-old series tells less about the Holocaust today than about how the murder scene in the late seventies brought in a television-friendly entertainment format. So it is itself historical, a relic on the long road of the Federal Republic to a (now fragile) memory consensus, in the center of which are the victims.

Contrary to today's viewing habits

A younger audience will hardly address the series: their narrative technique is antiquated, camera work, editing technique and dramaturgy no longer correspond to modern viewing habits.

The Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel had criticized "Holocaust" immediately after the broadcast as "soap opera". In fact, some movie scenes come across as melodramatic and cheesy. In addition, the German television or better streaming audience today is much less homogeneous than in 1979. The fate of a bourgeois German-Jewish family was aimed primarily at a middle-class audience in the middle class society. Whether it can still serve as identification for a diversified immigration society in 2019 is at least doubtful.

Unfortunately, neither commercial producers nor public broadcasters have the courage to shoot an updated "Holocaust" series or a remake of the classic. It would have to address a now heterogeneous audience and at the same time be at the height of Holocaust research. This has overcome the strict victim-perpetrator dichotomy, involves the followers and viewers of the murder of Jews, explores the diverse social relations in the occupied by the Germans in Eastern Europe.

With "Babylon Berlin" there is a lavish series about the Weimar Republic, in which anti-Semitism occurs only marginally, and counterfactual series about a Nazi victory, such as "The Man in the High Castle". But a contemporary cinematic narrative about the Holocaust is missing. There are good models for scripts: the enlightening micro-study by the American historian Omer Bartov about the Galician town of Butschatch, for example, or the virtuoso Romanian-Jewish family story "Oxenberg & Bernstein" by Ctlin Mihuleac. The fabric would be there.

Broadcast dates in the third programs