In Western news media, it is commonplace to show images of dead people only when these belong to another category than 'us', e g in reports from war scenes and disasters in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. However, it seems that the past can, indeed, be regarded "a foreign country" (Lowenthal 2015), as there is no shortage in today's media regarding often gruesome photos of fallen European soldiers during the First World War. What about the Second World War?
Combining memory studies, postcolonial theory, popular geopolitics, and Judith Butler's (2006; 2010) writings on grievable lives, this paper examines representations of death in documentary films about the Eastern Front during WWII, including a comparison with the North Africa Campaign. Whose death is included in the narrative, and how? How are dead soldiers and civilians represented, respectively, and what narrative functions can be attributed to them? What does this imply? The author argues that mainstream tv documentary films about WWII are not only powerful media of cultural memory (Erll 2010): moreover, they contribute to shaping our understanding of the contemporary world, including questions about identity and difference.
The paper is a draft for a chapter in a forthcoming monograph on media representations of WWII from a popular geopolitics perspective (cf Dittmer and Bos 2019). The comparison with North Africa is based on publications and research data from the author's postdoctoral study on Egyptian cultural memory of WWII (Kingsepp 2018a; Kingsepp 2018b).
