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Viktor (Ludwig Trepte) has a different kind of story At the end of the story, three of the five are together again in Berlin. Viktor goes his own way but meets Friedhelm. After the party in Berlin, the five are never together again but four of them meet up on the front and at various times Wilhelm and Friedhelm fight in the same unit and meet Charlotte. The scriptwriters send three of the friends to the Eastern front and Greta will visit the front as a popular singer for the troops. Friedhelm, Wilhelm’s younger brother is the most problematic character for me given the narrative structure. Is this plausible they ask? I don’t know – but it is a useful narrative device, requiring Greta to act in a way that will help Viktor escape Berlin. He is a Jewish tailor’s son and this character attracts most of the critics’ attention. Wilhelm has already fought in Poland and France and is a Leutnant in the Wehrmacht. “I represent German womanhood” Charlotte says when she presents herself as a nurse at a frontline hospital. They are Berliners so possibly more liberal than those elsewhere in Germany, but even so, two of them have approached the war in the spirit of fighting for the nation.
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This is important since they are just old enough to have known Germany before the Nazi regime took complete control, but have also been bombarded with propaganda as adolescents. The film begins in the Summer of 1941 when five young people are celebrating in Berlin before they split up and the war takes them into different stories. Outline story (no major spoilers about what happens to the characters) Finally, we should consider how it compares to films from other combatant nations in 1941-5.Ĭharlotte (Miriam Stein, left)) and Greta (Katharina Schüttler, right) on the home front As a popular film it does have some flaws and we need to address these – but it captured its audience and got audience members talking to each other. We should consider the riveting performances and the stupendous production design as well as the music and cinematography. Inevitably it will use the conventions of mainstream cinema, including the generic conventions of the combat picture and home-front melodrama.
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It is intended as popular entertainment on mainstream television. Again, the academics agreed that the events shown did have a historical basis but that they weren’t representative of the whole experience – and yes it wasn’t possible to cover the whole war in 4.5 hours! My argument is simple, let’s discuss this fascinating mini-series as a long-form film narrative. The second major issue raised was the depiction of the Poles, Ukrainians and Russians in the film and specifically their treatment of Jews. Its artistic intention is to engage younger Germans in an exploration of what their parents and grandparents might have experienced. Of course, he is right and that’s why the film needs to be discussed as a modern drama, not a historical reconstruction. He also admitted that it was impossible to represent characters from the 1940s in a modern drama in an historically accurate way. Richard Evans, while asserting that the film was not plausible in historical terms, noted that it was as if five young Germans from today had been parachuted into the events of 1941-45. The programme also included some brief interviews with two writers but my main problem with the discussion was that no one was prepared to discuss the film ‘as a film’ and there was no other filmmaker’s voice apart from the producer Benjamin Benedict. The discussion was intelligent and stimulating and the three academics, specialists in this period, historians Richard Evans and David Cesarani and writer/literature professor Eva Hoffman, all expressed their agreement on how well-made and exciting the film was as well as the range of problems it raised in terms of the history of East/Central Europe during the Second World War. This strategy was once fairly common on the BBC after controversial films or television productions but this is the first time (that I can remember) when a foreign language production received this kind of attention. The discussion was chaired by Martha Kearney, a regular presenter of cultural programming on the channel.
UNSERE MÜTTER UNSERE VÄTER SERIES
Volker Bruch as Wilhelm, the narrator of the storyĪfter the final episode of Generation War, BBC2 in the UK offered a discussion of the series by three distinguished academics alongside the series producer.