Mediendidaktische Reflexionen über Erinnerungskonstruktionen in Walter Benjamins Baudelaire-Studien und Roberto Benignis Film Das Leben ist schön

Presents theoretical validation and practical advice (a project description) for the use of Roberto Benigni's film "La vita è bella" in teaching history awareness to German high school students. The theoretical part discusses the actuality of Walter Benjamin's theory on modernity and confronts it with cinematic accounts of the Holocaust. Pp. 81-144 deal with the construction of experience and memory in "La vita è bella", interviews with high school students who have seen the film, and the use of the film as a pedagogical tool. Concludes that the experiential atrophy threatening today's media-exposed youth can be countered, and their history awareness developed, through viewing and discussing films which, like Benigni's, do not merely convey past events but construct them anew through cinematic narration. The way these films transmit the Holocaust bears similarities to the poetic process described by Benjamin. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)