Watching the Holocaust on TV – the Meaning of Television for the Long-term Development of Recipients’ Representations

The PhD-project aims to develop an approach to conceive long-term media effects, which can be applied to various topics. The selected example is the representation of the Holocaust in German television. The leading question for the research is which long-term meaning television has for mental representations (knowledge, episodic memories, emotions) of the Holocaust. Long-term in this case relates to cumulated experiences in the course of life.

As yet there are hardly any approaches of media impact studies, which exceed short- or medium-term, i.e. hours or weeks. The example of the Holocaust is of particular relevance regarding the continual memory of the Holocaust. Television is already one of the most used sources of information on National Socialism and the Holocaust. In the future, after the disappearance of the last contemporary witnesses, the medial knowledge transfer on this topic will gain relevance.

In an empirical survey, long-term media effects are being accessed through today’s perspective. Media-biographic interviews and group discussions with people from different generations and education levels will be executed. Thereby from today’s perspective early experiences with the Holocaust topic are reconstructed from memory and connected to mental representations. The results of this work contribute to fundamental research in the field of media effect studies. The choice of the example is further supposed to contribute to the question how the processing of National Socialism and the Holocaust can be dealt with in the future.