Daniel Schuster

Daniel is embarking on his second year as a PhD history student at the University of Kent. A Master’s history graduate from the University of Southampton, Daniel has always been interested in the key global conflicts of the twentieth century, from the First World War through to the Cold War. However what interests Daniel more is the ways societies remember these conflicts as time progresses and events begin to resonate less and less on a personal level as the number of surviving witnesses declines.

Daniel is particularly interested in studying the influence of film and television portrayals of history on popular conceptions of the past. Daniel hopes to build on the work of the Centre for Holocaust Education, who in their 2016 study of British secondary schoolchildren placed great emphasis on the influence of films such as The Boy in Striped Pyjamas (2008) on modern perceptions of the Holocaust.

Daniel has a wide range of research interests including memory studies, collective memory, Second World War, television and film portrayals of history, British national identity, German national identity and the use of social media as a primary source.

Thesis title and description

‘There was nothing unique about the Germans’: Analysing Modern British Views of the German Wartime Generation in responses to Historical Television Dramas

Daniel is researching modern British perceptions of the German wartime generation. He is focusing specifically on how people react to modern fictional portrayals of life in Nazi Germany. He is attempting to assess reactions to relevant television dramas from the last decade such as Generation War (2013), Charité at War (2019) and  Das Boot (2018-). Daniel will be utilising online reviews and social media reactions, as well as detailed interviews with viewing groups and screenwriters, along with responses to a planned 2022 Mass Observation Directive, to comprehensively understand British attitudes and provide a contribution to scholarly comprehension of both the continuing importance of the Second World War in British culture, and how this culture is shaped by film and television.

Daniel's work is supervised by supervised by Professor Juliette Pattinson and Dr Charlie Hall.