Questioning My Sense of History — Or, Some Historical Inquiry Inspired By Deutschland 83
Questioning My Sense of History — Or, Some Historical Inquiry Inspired By Deutschland 83
Sometimes you have an awareness of the historical quality of the moment you’re going through. I had a very clear sense that things would never be the same after the eleventh of September, 2001. I could feel the day being engraved in the land, in our memories, in our timelines. But a lot stuff doesn’t FEEL significant while it’s happening, especially childhood events, even if people TELL you a moment is momentous, sometimes it just all blends together in the fabric of a life.
I’ve lived long enough now that folks are making historical period dramas about eras I remember. It is super weird to see production teams get this wrong. Or to watch styles be elevated from a niche corner to a dominant style. (“No, 7 Lives of Lea, we did not all wear mesh, tiny tank tops and chokers all the time in the 90s. Your research included too many promo shots from the WB.”)
But sometimes, the events are so far in the past, I question my own memory of them. I know I am often wrong about what year a pop song came out, for example, so it’s very possible I can also misremember historical events.
I started to think about this while watching Deutschland 83, which, you’ll be shocked to learn, takes place in Germany in…1983. Now, I turned ten in 1983 so it is a year I remember, more or less. But I had no sense of what was happening in Germany (nor East nor West) in that year. I guess I knew Nena’s “99 Luft Ballons” (which, like a lot of Americans, I preferred to their “99 Red Balloons”) which came out in 1983 but, again, I would have guessed it came out two or three years later — based purely on my perception of when I started paying attention to pop music. My perception is usually wrong about anything before 1989. Everything before ’89 is all mixed up.
Deutschland 83 (the TV show) apparently chose to set their show in 1983 because of the music. In addition to the thematically appropriate music of Nena, the theme song of the show is also from 1983 — “Major Tom” by Peter Schilling (which is not a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” btw — just in conversation with it). The fact is, I was a big fan of a lot of the songs that were big in the West German charts of 1983. (Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”, Paul Young’s “Come Back and Stay”, Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.”) So it is clear that my perception of when I started to care about pop music is WAY off.
But — I found myself talking back to the show at one point, not about pop music, but about the AIDS crisis. A woman opened her desk drawer and there was a magazine with a story about AIDS on the cover. And I said, “Really? In 1983? Come on.” This is not because there wasn’t AIDS in 1983 because I’m pretty sure there was — but because I was skeptical of it being front page news in 1983. (I saw a production of The Normal Heart not so long after it was written. I feel like that’s part of why I felt so sure that the media coverage was later.)
And of course, I’m basing this on my own blurry memories of my childish knowledge of the AIDS crisis. My sense was that the mainstream media didn’t start talking about HIV until a couple of years later than Deutschland 83 would have us believe. I would have said there were no big stories about the AIDS crisis until 1985 or so. For me, the story loomed largest when Ryan White, a thirteen year old kid (only a year or so older than me!) got HIV from a blood transfusion, but I had a sense of the disease for a least a year before that. I asked my Gen X friend what year he thought AIDS became big news in the United States and he asked, “When did the Rock Hudson story break?”
We understand historical events’ placement in history by fixed points, by particular stories. Ryan White. Rock Hudson. I imagine that Tom Hanks will play a big role in our memories of the start of COVID 19. (Or maybe he won’t! We can’t know from here! He got through it just fine!)
Anyway — this subplot of the AIDS crisis in Germany in 1983 got me very curious because things could have been different in Germany! While American media was slow to pick up the story of HIV, maybe German media was quicker. Maybe the German government was less moronic about caring for its sick. Maybe my perception is overly American and there really were front page stories about HIV in Germany in 1983. Maybe they didn’t need a play like The Normal Heart because they were ahead of the game!
I looked into it. And I learned some things. For sure, 1983 was too early for American media addressing the crisis — and it wasn’t really a mainstream conversation in Germany either. However, the magazine that the secretary opens her drawer to reveal WAS a real magazine cover in June of 1983. So…a fair number of people were probably talking about it. Certainly, the German government’s response was actually much better than the American government’s response. (And to be clear, we’re talking about West Germany here. East Germany maintained that it had neither gays nor HIV until 1986, according to the show.) The level of care in West Germany was so much higher than it was in the US, with greater compassion and a much lower mortality rate. So — while I think Deutschland 83 may have been stretching the bounds of historical accuracy with the general population’s awareness of AIDS, there really was some journalism about it and investigating it did help me understand how much further ahead in health care West Germany was.
My conclusion:
Accurate for 1983: “99 Luft Ballons”, a NATO military exercise that nearly started a nuclear war and the AIDS crisis beginning to destroy communities of gay men, leading to a front page article in a magazine.
Probably Inaccurate for 1983: An East German spy single-handedly preventing a nuclear war, a mother telling her daughter to use a condom because of AIDS. But — hey, maybe!
My understanding about Deutschland 83 is that it was inspired by one of the writers’ military service in West Germany, when he was put to work translating Russian messages. But that work was later. In 1983, he was thirteen or fourteen years old, so his memories of that year, while likely better than mine, are probably a little blurry too. Maybe it’s all more accurate to the feeling of history if it’s a little mixed up. I guess that’s why we shouldn’t use period dramas as history lessons. Or maybe we can just use them as jumping off points to learn the real history.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on November 3, 2023.
