‘ICH HATTE BEFEHLE’: MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY AND THE VIETNAM WAR IN HEYNOWSKI AND SCHEUMANN'S PILOTEN IM PYJAMA (1968)*

Abstract

East German documentarians Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann's four-part documentary Piloten im Pyjama (1968) focuses on interviews with downed US bomber pilots who had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War. The documentary draws explicit connections between the American presence in Vietnam and Germany's recent Nazi past, thus creating a memorial link between East German and Vietnamese citizens. This article analyses the connections drawn between Nazism and the Vietnam War throughout the course of the documentary, ultimately arguing that the film is not simply an anti-Western condemnation of imperialism, but also a work of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg) which creates a space in which questions of responsibility, duty, and guilt can be confronted from the standpoint of a perpetrator collective.