Their pals Viktor (Ludwig Trepte), a Jewish tailor, and his Christian girlfriend, Greta (Katharina Schüttler), an aspiring singer, stay behind. Joining them is Charlotte (Mirian Stein), an idealistic army nurse with an as-yet-unrequited love for Wilhelm. When the film opens, sin is already in full flower.Ĭovering a period of about four years, from the summer of 1941 until just after German capitulation in 1945, “Generation War” is narrated by Wilhelm Winter (Volker Bruch), a young and honorable army officer who is heading for the Eastern Front with his younger brother Friedhelm (Tom Schilling), a bookish and cynical enlisted man. While admirably delineating moral decay, which eats away at one character like a virus, the movies never really get at the seed of evil.Īnd maybe that never can be explained.
The films are highly entertaining and highly disturbing, in the latter case for both the right and the wrong reasons.
“Generation War” has mixed success in explaining the atrocities that were committed. Isn’t making monsters out of people just as bad as trying to find the human heart that beats in the breast of the criminal? In truth, however, “Generation War” is no more convenient than any number of American World War II dramas that do exactly the opposite and demonize all Germans by turning every one, without nuance, into a frothing-at-the-mouth stormtrooper. Crafting a story around the fates of five 20-year-old best friends from Berlin, none of whom is a Nazi, and one of whom is a Jew, is a convenient fiction, some said. The essence of the complaints was that it let a dying generation off too easily - specifically, the generation that built and fought for the Third Reich. Some critics found fault with the story’s relegation of Nazis to a background role and its focus on ordinary, or at least, racially tolerant Germans. theaters as a two-part film, averaged more than 7 million viewers each night, not everyone loved it.
Though the World War II drama, now repackaged for U.S. When “Generation War” aired on German television last year under the title “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” the three-night miniseries had people across the country arguing its merits, both artistic and political.
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