HERSTORY? THE POTENTIAL OF FEMALE-CENTRED HISTORICAL MINISERIES MADE IN GERMANY (2001-2021) by Sandra Becker and Berber Hagedoorn

“[W]hen women in the movement use herstory, their purpose is to emphasize that women’s lives, deeds, and participation in human affairs have been neglected or undervalued in standard histories,” wrote the feminist activist Casey Miller and activist/linguist Kate Swift in their publication Words and Women (1976: 135). 40 years later, the goals for equality that second wave feminists like Miller and Swift fought for are far from having been achieved both globally and in the West. To this end, in 2016, the United Nations picked up the term to organise an exhibition on HERstory: Celebrating Women Leaders in the United Nations, as visual support of their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the goal to “[a]chieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”.

Raising awareness for this issue inspired other projects for greater gender equality, such as the gender equality pledge “5050by2020” (est. 2018) in the international film industry (Gober, 2020: 71). In Germany, the significant impact of the film and television industries on representations, stories and the remembrance of female creators and actors in history has been recently addressed in a surge of publications on gender representation, such as Hidden: Women in German Film and Television (Prommer and Linke, 2019), and movements for more diversity in film and TV like #actout and their 2021 manifest “We are already here” fighting for the recognition of non-binary, queer and trans actors and actresses. [1]

In March 2021 – one year after the first planned Diversity Summit 2020 – For More Diversity on Television, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic – the third season of the female ensemble-led, historical drama miniseries Ku’damm 63 (ZDF, 2021) followed the success of its earlier seasons (season 1, Ku’damm 56, 2016, and season 2, Ku’damm 59, 2018) with an average audience size of 6.14 million on both TV and the online streaming service of the German public service broadcaster ZDF. The slogan on the poster for the third season of this “event family series”, which tells the life stories of the three sisters Eva, Helga and Monika Schöllack (see Figure 1, from right to left) in post-WWII Berlin, highlights the changing gender ideals and trajectories of its main characters. Just as in the 1920s-set Bauhaus miniseries Die Neue Zeit (ZDF, 2019), Ku’damm 63 explores a time of changing gender relations and proclaims “a new era”. Interestingly, both series seem to be the outcome of a likewise new era in recent German TV history. Next to the general developments in German television to produce historical “high-cost miniseries” or “event movies” that started in 2001 (Cooke, 2016: 175) and the “late emergence of German high-end quality serials” (Eichner, 2020: 191) in 2015, we have observed a parallel development: an increasing number of female-centred, historical made-for-TV movies and miniseries airing on German television networks since the mid-2000s. It is the latter trend that this blog will focus on.

The idea for this report goes back to our upcoming research publication titled “‘All Things New?’ The Female-Centred Historical Miniseries Die Neue Zeit and German High-End Series Production” (Becker and Hagedoorn, forthcoming), in which we offer a critical analysis of the gender dynamics in German female-centred historical miniseries since the mid-2000s, and the particular case of Die Neue Zeit. Here, we reflect on the extent in which, and how, the historical miniseries as well as the made-for-TV drama film or “TV movie” has become a mode of audiovisual storytelling from a female perspective, one which has allowed the writing of women and female experiences in different time periods back into German history.

We consider female-centred historical miniseries like Die Neue Zeit to be informed by the following three trends and the tension between them: (1) television as a significant mediator of past and historical events in modern media systems (amongst others Bondebjerg, 2020; Edgerton, 2020; Hagedoorn, 2020; Gray and Bell, 2013); (2) the call for more female representations on and off international screens – going beyond U.S. discourses on #MeToo, #TimesUp and #InclusionRider and the international film festival gender parity pledge 5050×2020 (Ryberg, 2020; Prommer and Linke, 2019; Heiduschke, 2018; Baer and Fenner, 2018); and (3) the wide production and consumption of ‘Quality TV’ drama series in European national markets, in particular Germany’s efforts to appeal to an increasingly global and transnational entangled market (for instance Eichner, Mikos and Winter, 2013; Krauß, 2020) (see Becker and Hagedoorn, forthcoming).

To give our future readers a better understanding of the peculiarities of German TV programming and TV market developments, we precede our research publication with this report: a reflection on the history of historical (female-centred) miniseries in Germany in the last twenty years and their international appeal. This overview allows for closer insights into the longer ongoing niche trend in German historical TV miniseries towards female-centred narratives. It is likewise interesting to a readership that might otherwise be more familiar with the better researched long tradition of historical made-for-TV movies and miniseries in Germany (see Bleicher, 2016). The following graphics have been created based on our research and the chronological overview we established of such historical TV dramas produced in Germany between 2001-2021 (i.e., our database – for examples of such use of quantitative research methods for television studies, see: Andrews, 2014; Weissmann, 2009). Additional information on production has been retrieved from the database Crew United.

Due to the need for limitations, we decided not to consider documentary series with (parts of) enacted scenes. Since our focus is on historical TV drama series and historical miniseries produced in Germany between 2001 and mid-2021, media texts like for example the historical film The White Ribbon [Das Weiße Band: Eine Deutsche Kindergeschichte] (dir. Michael Haneke, 2009) have also not been taken into account, even though the story of this German/Austrian/French/Italian co-production is centred on life in a Northern German village in 1913 and was later on aired on television. Similarly, due to our research focus, we have not included Austrian-German co-produced historical TV-movies and miniseries that were primarily produced by ORF into our database, such as Sisi (dir. Xaver Schwarzenberger, 2009), Das Attentat – Sarajevo 1914 (dir. Andreas Prochaska, 2014), Das Sacher (dir. Robert Dornhelm, 2016), and Maximilian – Das Spiel von Macht und Liebe [Maximilian and Marie de Bourgogne] (dir. Andreas Prochaska, 2017).

Out of a total of 83 listed historical TV-movies, “Mehrteiler” (Bleicher, 2016: 27), and longer-running (mini)series included in our overview, we categorize 30 as female-centred, meaning that 36% of the historical miniseries and TV-movies produced in Germany since 2001 listed in our database are led by a female protagonist and centred around their life stories. As can be seen in Figure 3, the production of female-centred miniseries and TV-movies particularly peaked during the period between 2015 and 2019 with productions like the biopics Käthe Kruse (ARD, 2016), Katharina Luther (ARD, 2016), and Aenne Burda (ARD/SWR, 2018) and (mini)series like Ku’damm 56 and 59 (ZDF, 2016; 2018), Charité (season 1, 2017, ARD/MDR, 2017), Zarah (ZDF, 2017) and the Bauhaus miniseries Die Neue Zeit [Bauhaus: A New Era] (ZDF, 2019).

The overall number is significant, particularly with regard to the potential of fictional, historical miniseries and female-centred biopics to reinscribe women into the wider cultural memory and thus to write Herstory. Even so, the percentage seems less impressive when put into context. In their large-scale quantitative content analysis on the representation of women in German film and television, Prommer and Linke (2019: 51) found genres like the soap opera or telenovelas – such as Rote Rosen (ARD, 2006-present) and Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten (RTL, 1992-present) – as well as romantic movies for a primarily female audience (Rosamunde Pilcher, ZDF, 1993-present) and German long-running crime series (Tatort, ARD, 1970-present) to top this percentage, with 44% of the productions of those genres featuring a female lead character. The percentage of female-centred historical miniseries in our overview is indeed almost identical with and slightly below the overall underrepresented number of female protagonists in German fictional TV series: 38%, compared to the overwhelming majority of 62% of male protagonists (Prommer and Linke, 2019: 51).

Whereas our report demonstrates that female-centred historical miniseries with regard to their numerical representation are still scarce, our findings also point towards crucial developments behind the camera. German female-centred historical miniseries have offered a noteworthy number of 35 female writers to tell Herstory on the small screen (versus 19 female writers for the non-female-centred narratives). However, the number of all-female writing teams is scarce: 15 historical miniseries listed in our database were produced by a single female writer and 3 by an all-female team of writers (see Figure 4 and 5). This finding seems to support Prommer and Linke’s argument of an interconnection between “the gender of the filmmakers and the content that we see on the small and silver screen” (2019: 150). As our findings demonstrate, the number of female screenwriters almost doubles in female-centred historical miniseries and TV-movies produced in Germany since 2001; and the number of single female directors quadruples, when compared to the rest of the historical narratives (which we summarise as “non-female-centred”).

Female-centred historical miniseries have in particular offered a remarkable number of female directors to tell Herstory on the small screen (see Figure 6 and 7). Out of the 30 female-centred TV-movies and miniseries in our database, 8 were made by female directors (versus 2 single female directors for the non-female-centred narratives, which otherwise has 3 more cases of male-female teams or female duos, see Figure 7). Female-centred productions with all-female writers plus directors’ team still remain absolute exceptions – like the two-part post-WWII miniseries Aenne Burda: Die Wirtschaftswunderfrau [Aenne Burda: The Economic Miracle] (2018), and the critically-acclaimed TV movie Aufbruch in die Freiheit [Freedom’s Calling] (2018) on the topic of abortion in 1970s Germany. In this context, our database only lists one production with a female director and writer for a non-female-centred narrative: Ein Dorf wehrt sich [Secret in the Mountain] from 2019 by Gabriela Zerhau.

With this report, we have tried to show the potential of the specific genre of the German historical miniseries for female creators working in TV production, and we hope to inspire colleagues to embark on further research. To further investigate the potential of German historical TV miniseries to include trends in gender representation and their international appeal, we invite you to continue reading our forthcoming publication on German high-end series production and the female-centred historical miniseries Die Neue Zeit, which goes beyond these numerical findings of the representation of women in front and behind the camera, and dives deeper into the symbolic representations in the audiovisual text and the gender dynamics in the historical miniseries format.

 

 

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Sandra Becker (s.becker@uu.nl) is Lecturer in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the co-editor of Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse (UWP, 2021) together with Sara Polak (Leiden University) and Megen de Bruin-Molé (University of Southampton) and has amongst others published in RSAJournal: Rivista di Studi Americani on the portrayal of gendered response to crises and visions of apocalypse in the U.S. historical Quality TV drama series Manhattan (WGN America).

Berber Hagedoorn (b.hagedoorn@rug.nl) is Assistant Professor in Media Studies and Audiovisual Culture at the University of Groningen. Her research interests revolve around screen cultures (representations and crossmedia storytelling practices) and audiovisual cultural memory in Europe. Hagedoorn is Vice-Chair of the ECREA Television Studies Section and EUscreen Foundation Board Member and organises cooperation for European research and education into television’s history and its future as a multi-platform storytelling practice. She is the co-editor of two special issues on the ‘youthification’ of television in Critical Studies in Television (issues 16.2 and 16.4, 2021) and the forthcoming edited volume New Challenges in European Television Series: National Experiences in a Transnational Context (Editorial Comares).

 

 

Footnote

[1] The research by Elizabeth Prommer and Christine Linke was recently published in English in form of an open access journal article: Linke, C. and Prommer, E. (2021). From fade-out into spotlight: An audio-visual character analysis (ACIS) on the diversity of media representation and production culture. Studies in Communication Sciences, 21(1), 145–161. cstonline.netdoi.org/10.24434/j.scoms.2021.01.010

 

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