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Since unification in 1990, the number of films dealing with Germany's various pasts has surged. The problem they confront us with, however, is no longer how to come to terms with the past (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, Adorno), but how to convey the challenges of an ambivalent heritage.

German Memory Contests (Anne Fuchs) confronts the realms of private vs. the public, family vs. generation, victims vs. perpetrators, and fact vs. fiction, and opens up a dialogue which aims to transform “bad history" into a positive account of the past.

Michael Braun’s lecture will present films significant for confronting a different kind of iconoclastic, pluralistic, and fictionalized memory. What happens if filmmakers insert new narratives to well-known histories (like Bryan Singer in Operation Walküre with Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg)? How do GDR comedies like Good-bye, Lenin! and Sonnenallee make us laugh about a putrefied state? And how do these remembrance films change our image of the different German pasts?

Michael Braun is the director of the literature department at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and author of numerous publications dealing with memory and German culture, including the 2010 Wem gehört die Geschichte? Erinnerungskultur in Literatur und Film (To Whom Does History Belong? The Culture of Memory in Literature and Film).