The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past is the second major BBC television documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It was originally broadcast on BBC Two in 1995. In the series, Curtis examines the different ways that history and memory (both national and individual) have been used and manipulated by politicians and others.
Summary of episodes
Part 1. "On the Desperate Edge of Now" This episode, broadcast on 30 May 1995, examines how the various national ideals and memories of the Second World War were effectively buried, rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War era, only to violently resurface later with events such as the protests of 1968, the emergence of the Red Army Faction, and the turmoil of the Yugoslav Wars.
For Germany, this process began at the Nuremberg Trials, where the use of the film The Nazi Plan was intended to reveal the criminality of the Nazi state, and attempts were made to prevent defendants—principally Hermann Göring—from providing any rational or contextualized argument for their actions during the war. Subsequently, however, bringing lower-ranking Nazis to justice was all but forgotten in the interests of maintaining West Germany as an important new ally in the Cold War. For the Allies, faced with a new enemy in the Soviet Union, there was a need to portray World War II as a crusade of pure good against pure evil, even if this meant creating a mismatch by denying the memories of the individual soldiers who had actually done the fighting and knew it to have been far more ambiguous.
The title of this episode comes from a veteran's description of the uncertainty of survival in combat. A number of American veterans related how, years later, they found themselves plagued with previously suppressed memories of the brutal things they had seen and done.
Contributors
Louis Simpson, Private in US Airborne Division 1943–45
Paul Fussell, infantryman in US Army 1944–45
Frau Witta and Frau Torman, housekeepers at Carinhall
Utz Ulrich, Curator, Nuremberg museum
Carlo Jahn, Gatekeeper of Congress Hall, Nuremberg
Herr Fruehwirt, member of the Hitler Youth 1933–41
Peter Uiberall, Goering's interpreter at Nuremberg trials
Burton C. Andrus Jnr, son of Burton C. Andrus, Commandant of the Nuremberg Prison Robert Wolfe, Head of Captured German Documents, US National Archives Mary Burns, stenographer at Nuremberg trials Horst Mahler, a leader of Red Army Faction George Garand, interrogator at Nuremberg trials Anna Cameron, stenographer at Nuremberg trials Drexel Sprecher, US lawyer at Nuremberg trials Dr John Lattimer, urologist for defendants at Nuremberg trials Peter Block, Keeper of the Statues, Bellevue Palace Andre Dufresne, infantryman in US Army 1943–45 Kitta Wagner, Nuremberg resident Egon Hanfstaengel, son of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler's confidant Herman Gremlitza, student movement, 1968 Christiane Ensslin, sister of Gudrun Ensslin, a founder of Red Army Faction Alfred Kernd'l, Chief Archaeologist to the City of Berlin
Part 2. "You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough" In this episode, broadcast on 6 June 1995, the early history of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) use of brainwashing and mind control is examined. Its thesis is that a search for control over the past, via medical intervention, had to be abandoned, and that in modern times, control over the past is more effectively exercised by the manipulation of history. It concludes that despite successful attempts to remove memories of the past, doing so often left an emotional void that was hard to refill.
The angle pursued by Curtis is the way in which psychiatry historically pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of societal control. The work of Ewen Cameron is surveyed, with particular reference to the early medical use of electroconvulsive therapy, Cold War theories of communist brainwashing, and the search for hypnoprogammed sleeper agents and assassins. After the intelligence agency failures over the Kennedy assassination and the failed assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, this work was later abandoned in favour of computerised memory and intelligence research, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created in 1958.