1. Introduction: A New Europe, the Post-Documentary Turn and Docudrama

This book is predicated on the idea that the screen genre docudrama became ubiquitous during the latter part of the twentieth century. It argues in general that the genre was made for new times. Fact-based art in general burgeoned during this period, part of a millennial zeitgeist. It is tempting to relate this to Francis Fukuyama’s controversial 1992 concept of the ‘End of History’, which posited a new world order at the close of a century in which the capitalist system seemed triumphant. While the coming of this order seems less likely in the second decade of the new century, it is clear enough that Greater Europe has been radically reconfigured in the past quarter-century, and that more change must come. Initially, the new era was heralded by striking workers in Poland, by Gorbachev’s glasnost policy in the USSR, and, crucially, by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even before the fall of the Wall, the forests of aerials pointing westwards in East Germany, remarked by many visitors from the West during the long Cold War period, were testament to many things, including the desire for a ‘free’ media in the East that would open up proscribed subjects. The extent to which any medium can actually be free will, of course, always be debatable. But the Wall and its collapse became a powerful symbol of contrasting desires arising from opposed political systems. If keeping some things out was uppermost on one side of the Wall, letting some things in was surely the aim of those aerials. On both sides was a consciousness of a Europe still troubled by its twentieth-century past and becoming confused by the looming twenty-first-century future. The ramifications of the break-up of an uneasy Pan-European postwar settlement that had seemed for two generations to be set in stone, the emergence of a new, and unsettled, Europe, triggered many things—as the subsequent two-and-a-half decades have shown.