Heritage, Heimat and the Political Coding of the Reimagined Past: The Early Twentieth Century in Contemporary British and German Popular Culture

This comparative study examines how contemporary British and German film and television productions set in the early twentieth century are embedded in and influenced by the political and cultural contexts of the early twenty-first century. By conducting close readings of key works such as Downton Abbey and Babylon Berlin, the study explores how these productions go beyond mere period entertainment to encode, reflect, or even reinforce contemporary ideological and political tendencies, including conservatism, traditionalism, and emergent right-wing populist sentiments. Drawing on cultural memory studies, theories of genre, and approaches from comparative media analysis, the study situates these reimaginings within the heritage film tradition in Britain and the Heimatfilm tradition in Germany. British productions frequently present a sanitised, harmonious vision of the Edwardian era, in which class divisions are romanticised, and imperial legacies remain largely unexamined. Such nostalgic and sanitised portrayals can be read as a coded longing for pre-EU ‘simplicity,’ resonating with the Brexit-era desire to preserve a conservative national identity. Conversely, German reimaginings foreground stark realism and historical precarity, especially with a view to the preconditions for emergent National Socialism. They highlight contested memories, moral ambivalence, and the persistent influence of a repressed yet ever-present past. In these narratives, latent coding points to a complex interplay of guilt, victimhood, and complicity, inviting consideration of how contemporary German society engages—or fails to engage—with the lingering shadows of its history. By examining how underlying character coding, selective focus on historical moments, specific settings, and narrative motifs channel current political anxieties into evocative images of the past, this thesis posits that popular culture has an ever growing influence on contemporary attitudes toward history, memory and present politics.