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generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

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    generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

    RTE2 have been showing this german WW2 mini-series - concluding part was tonight. i'm not sure whether it's been shown in the UK. apparently it was a big ratings success in germany, which doesn't surprise me - it's a decent piece of work.

    SPOILERS AHEAD

    the original german title is "our mothers, our fathers". it seems they thought this title would be too confusing for an english-speaking audience (our mothers... whuh?), so it's lamely retitled "generation war".

    the original title suggests what the series is - an effort to understand the experience of the german generation that fought the war, and mostly didn't talk much about it afterwards. at the end, the dates of the characters are given as though they are real people - only one of them is still alive - and the implication seems to be: why don't you go ask grandad what he did in the war, pretty soon you won't have the chance.

    the problem with the show - and i did generally enjoy it - is that if the wartime experience of most germans was like this, they probably wouldn't have kept so schtum about it afterwards. they would have written books and told their stories around the world, and the world would have said "how could we have got you guys so wrong?"

    germany has been exemplary in terms of how it has faced up to its own war crimes, at least compared to almost all other countries. however, i do find german treatments of the war do have a tendency to shy away from confronting how morally compromised many germans really were. in the german movies on this theme there's usually an otherness to the evil, scarcely less than in the old american WW2 movies. i'm reminded of the nervous glances albert speer throws saround the room whenever hitler says something anti-semitic in "downfall".

    would it have been too much if just one of the five central characters in this show had been an actual nazi? i'm starting to wonder whether hitler was the only committed nazi in germany, and the rest of the country just sort of went along with it for 12 years because they were embarrassed for him and couldn't think what else to say.

    in "generation war" even the character who becomes a dead-eyed killing machine on the eastern front has got a heart of gold. we know since the moment we see him shooting civilians that he's unlikely to survive to the end of the story, but we also understand that his savagery ultimately stems from his desperate weltschmerz, his all-too-acute sense of the void. ultimately he redeems himself, first by fragging his officer to save his jewish friend, then by walking into a wall of bullets to show the fanatical 12-year olds in his command why they should now surrender to the russians rather than walk into a wall of bullets.

    we also know that the story of greta, the only one of the german characters who doesn't do her duty for the fatherland, is probably going to end badly, because she snuggles up to the regime to boost her own career in a "mephisto" kind of way, and because the gestapo major she gets involved with is so obviously a murderous psychopath. but she's always ignorant rather than malignant, and she too ultimately gains insight and dies with a clean soul.

    a somewhat annoying feature of the show is the extent to which the story is structured around an unlikely series of fateful chance encounters. the silliest of these comes close to the end, when decent-skin nurse charlotte is about to be raped by a russian soldier, only to be saved by the sudden arrival on the scene of a senior female soviet officer - who happens to be the same jewish doctor charlotte shopped to the SS several years before (which she's obviously been eaten up with guilt about ever since).

    the doctor/officer looks magnificent - years of hard fighting have seemingly only added layers of gloss to her lustrous raven hair (in fact, most of the characters' hair looks pretty awesome throughout). it turns out that she is the only officer in the red army who is also a committed disciple of gandhi: she forgives charlotte her betrayal because otherwise, "it will never end". i think most of the russians had another idea of how it was going to end.

    it's not that this show flinches from depicting war crimes or tries to get the germans off the hook (though apparently some poles were annoyed by the portrayal of their partisans as anti-semitic). and i liked the twist at the end, where the jewish character is appalled to discover that the allies have hired the gestapo major to help run the new police force in the full knowledge of who he really is.

    it's that it doesn't ask: "why?" it's a show about ordinary people trying to make the best of a bad situation in their different ways, and i'm not sure it adds much to our understanding of what happened. i mean, you don't get the war on the eastern front out of the aggregate effect of millions of ordinary people trying to make the best of a bad situation. somewhere along the line a great deal of malice and hatred came into the mix.

    there is malice and hatred in this show, and it all flows from secondary characters - that gestapo major, the hatchet-faced nurse, the awful woman who moves into the jewish family's apartment after they're sent to the camps, a series of berserkers on the front... none of these characters are properly drawn, we don't have any sense of their motivations or the basis of their malice. they must be other people's mothers, other people's fathers. i hope so, because it would be awful if you asked grandad what he did in the war, and it turned out he was one of those guys.

    #2
    generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

    I broadly agree with pretty much everything here.

    I imagine that the reason for focussing on five people who are not inherent followers of Nazism is to create empathy with the viewer. The viewer wouldn't identify with a sieg heiling fanatic.

    And the group had a Jewish friend -- an important element in telling the story -- so they obviously wouldn't have been committed to Nazism.

    I thought the story made an interesting point about how much the population should have known about Nazi atrocities. It's more complex than simply the post-war defence of "we had no idea" and the accusation of "you can't have but known".

    The series affected me personally because, like one of the protagonists, my father fought at Stalingrad and held the rank of lieutenant. Like the protagonist, my father was a decent man and not a follower of the Nazis. So there is one scene, where an order is being given, in particular that spooked me. Some of the stuff, or similar stuff, doubtless happened to my father or could have happened to him.

    Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter was very good, though in some respects frustrating -- especially the coincidences, as garcia points out. But the real value resides not in its dramatic merits, but in its contribution to the on-going process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

    It created the space for renewed discussion on the past; and, as I understand it, gave energy to a dialogue which had become a bit fatigued. Don't forget, the children of "our mothers, our fathers" are mostly nearing retirement age. To middle-aged people, they are more often than not grandparents; to younger people even great-grandparents. The question is, why should they care; the mini-series gave an example why they might.

    On the subject of ordinary people facilitating Nazi crimes, specifically the Holocaust, I really recommend Mary Fulbrook's A Small Town Near Auschwitz.

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      #3
      generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

      I imagine that the reason for focussing on five people who are not inherent followers of Nazism is to create empathy with the viewer. The viewer wouldn't identify with a sieg heiling fanatic.
      i thought that might be a reason, but i'm not convinced it's really true. viewers are capable of empathy with all kinds of villains, from macbeth to tony soprano - why not a nazi? i think it's more likely that what deters german writers from trying to create such a character is: what if they succeeded?

      actually, there was a book a few years ago whose narrator was an SS officer, "the kindly ones" by jonathan littell. it won big prizes in france, but i don't think it really worked. the narrator is one of these hannibal lecter-type SS officers who loves bach and can't even have a wank without turning it into a big production with ligatures and pictures of his twin sister. he really was difficult to empathise with. i mean, he was just a dick.

      I thought the story made an interesting point about how much the population should have known about Nazi atrocities. It's more complex than simply the post-war defence of "we had no idea" and the accusation of "you can't have but known".
      would you expand on that?

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        #4
        generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

        There were many people who closed themselves off to the reports given by those who had seen things, for several reasons.

        There are those who didn't want to know because the facts distorted their image of the benevolent Party (and thus of themselves); those who felt helpless in dealing with the information and the disgust they might have felt (with the added threat that making known that disgust could have had serious repercussions); or those who couldn't handle the idea of defeat after all their sacrifices.

        They could have known, but tried not to know.

        And there were many who had seen things but didn't report them, because of fear of the Gestapo or because they thought their families or friends couldn't digest the truth or because they felt it futile to explain what was incomprehensible to those who had not seen action, or because of some sense of soldiers' omerta.

        I think many, perhaps most, of these reasons were touched on in the mini-series.

        It would be interesting to see the reaction to a sympathetic evil Nazi on German TV. But German producers would be very nervous, lest they are accused of trivialising atrocities, or something.

        In any case, I think the group in he mini-series was more representative of the average German than the blackshirts. Though perhaps not quite as representative as they might have been -- having a Jewish friend in 1941 was pretty daring shit

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          #5
          generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

          Wasn't "Generation War" the title of a HBO miniseries on the Iraq War?

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            #6
            generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

            Appears that that was "Generation Kill".

            garcia, have you seen any portion of Heimat?

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              #7
              generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

              i haven't, no. i confess to being put off by its immense length

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                #8
                generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                It is worth it, if you have the patience. It is a mnini series, really, not an overlong film.

                I'd quibble with some artistic elements, such as the arbitrary switching from colour to black & white.

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                  #9
                  generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                  Starts on BBC2 this coming Saturday 9.30pm. Looks like it's worth a punt.

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                    #10
                    generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                    It's jolly good so far.

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                      #11
                      generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                      garcia wrote: a somewhat annoying feature of the show is the extent to which the story is structured around an unlikely series of fateful chance encounters. the silliest of these comes close to the end, when decent-skin nurse charlotte is about to be raped by a russian soldier, only to be saved by the sudden arrival on the scene of a senior female soviet officer - who happens to be the same jewish doctor charlotte shopped to the SS several years before (which she's obviously been eaten up with guilt about ever since).
                      I've watched this over the last few evenings as the last episode was on BBC4 the other day and for me this was the 'oh come on' moment that wasn't really needed and undermined an otherwise good series - some of the other chance meetings were pushing it but this was completely OTT.

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                        #12
                        generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                        Vergangenheitsbewältigung
                        What does that mean? It's a long'un, evenby the standards of German compound adjectives.

                        I found the series pretty compelling and thought-provoking nonetheless. I found myself tolerating the coincidences - and the fact that some of them avoided more certain-death experiences than seemed plausible - because of the broader arc of what was going on.

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                          #13
                          generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                          Crammed into four and a half hours, a story with this scale of ambition was bound to suffer somehow. It really warranted the thirteen episodes a season over three or four years that subscription cable offers. The string of coincidences wouldn't then have been as necessary, neither would some of the jarring character inconsistencies. The most problematic of these, to me, was Charlotte turning in her Russian Jewish doctor/assistant (mentioned above) to the Gestapo. Why would she do this when days earlier one of her closest friends was Jewish? The gap between it not mattering, or her even being sympathetic, and drinking the Nazi Kool-Aid seemed too abrupt to be acceptable, or consistent. I wanted to know how this transformation worked, how it was rationalized and thought through.

                          Overall it was worthy, rather than really good, production I think. I also had the feeling it was targeted at an older audience — maybe my age and up — rather than younger or even middle-aged Germans (which I guess the original title suggests.) But it's just a hunch, based on style and structure more than anything, I'm not familiar enough with German TV for it to be anything else.

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                            #14
                            generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                            What does that mean? It's a long'un, evenby the standards of German compound adjectives.
                            it basically means "the process of coming to terms with the past."

                            The most problematic of these, to me, was Charlotte turning in her Russian Jewish doctor/assistant (mentioned above) to the Gestapo. Why would she do this when days earlier one of her closest friends was Jewish? The gap between it not mattering, or her even being sympathetic, and drinking the Nazi Kool-Aid seemed too abrupt to be acceptable, or consistent. I wanted to know how this transformation worked, how it was rationalized and thought through.
                            strictly it's not "days earlier" that one of her friends is jewish - a bit of time has passed, and she's seen a lot of horrible shit in the field hospital in that time. so maybe she has more of a sense of what is at stake, and her sense of loyalty to the german authority has been sharpened. and obviously this character is also kind of straight, an innocent type, and remember the jewish doctor lies to her about being jewish. so maybe those things explain how she goes from being friends with a jew to turning one in to the gestapo. but of course, she then immediately thinks better of it and tries to help the doctor escape - it's her hatchet-faced friend who completes the job of turning her in.

                            so, um, yeah, it's basically a mess.

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                              #15
                              generation war / unsere mütter, unsere väter

                              I'll buy the "horrible shit" as a motivator for hating Russians, but not so much Jews.

                              Yes she's young, but the anti-Jew propaganda in late 30s Germany was intense. The four non-Jews of the five friends would have long since dealt with their consciences on the matter I'd have thought.

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