Abstract
In this article, I take the example of the historical German television fiction success Weissensee and ask how East Germans have read and judged the way this serial constructed their past more than a decade after its television premiere. This question is raised against the background that Weissensee was produced at a time when all questions related to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) seemed to have been answered. In the meantime, the remembrance discourse has changed. Hall’s encoding/decoding model, Giddens’s identity theory, and Sabrow’s typology of memories of the GDR provided the theoretical framework. Empirically, this study draws on five focus groups of East Germans, and the findings demonstrate that the dominant media memory, the dictatorship discourse, still operates within three reading positions. More recent discourses are visible but have not (yet) expanded the horizon to relocate oneself in the past. This study contributes to the rare research on authenticity from an audience perspective.