In reunified Germany, cinema and television have allowed viewers to experience the Third Reich in close-up and from within. Efforts within the media industry to find new audiences contributed as much to this shift in perspective as did changes in popular memory. On the economic level, the liberalization of the audiovisual sector since the mid-1980s paved the way for intimate portrayals of the Nazi past. Its main features are amateur snapshots of life under the swastika, personal testimonies filmed in a studio or with a vérité-style documentary camera, as well as dramatized inside views of the regime. But liberalization also facilitated new forms of portraying the collective. Whereas special-effects-heavy Hollywoodesque spectacles aimed to simulate the German traumata of war, the re-emergence of the “Heimatfilm” (homeland film) genre, and its image of community, served to assess the legacy of the Third Reich, from the persecution of Jews to the loss of homelands in the east. This turn toward intimacy and immersion occurred at a time when German film sought to broaden its distribution, from the international sales of television productions to the worldwide success of feature films about dark chapters of German history.

Also on the level of popular memory, the political caesura of 1990 was not a turning point but part of a gradual change driven by both national and international factors. Supported by film events such as Schindler’s List (1993), the 1990s saw the proliferation of Holocaust memory and the establishing of an international memory culture of Jewish victimhood. Their impact on German images of the Nazi past in particular was enormous. Throughout the decade, the Holocaust stands at the center of numerous productions for cinema and television. The move toward inner views of the regime occurs step by step, becoming discernible around the mid-1990s and achieving dominance around the turn of the millennium. The Holocaust either continues to be the implicit or explicit benchmark of the histories presented, or it is acknowledged in a gesture of political correctness. Toward the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a whole series of films traced private perceptions of the regime, presenting, as I have shown, the past through the prisms of shame, intimacy, fascination, and seduction.