Scripting Genocide: The Wannsee Conference on Television, 1960–2022

Scripting Genocide investigates how the dramatic, fictionalized depictions of the Wannsee Conference offered filmmakers, and especially screenwriters, opportunities to be public historians. This book also contains the final interviews with screenwriters Paul Mommertz and Loring Mandel. Following the methods of the New Film History, which is grounded in archival production material, oral history interviews, and screenplay analysis, this book asks why and how filmmakers have grappled with portraying Wannsee in dramatic form since the 1960s. Each of these docudramas contributed to a diffuse body of work the author conceptualizes as "antifascist television." In the end, all of these productions argue that words prefigure deeds.