Generation War

When it aired in Germany last year it caused controversy, with its depiction of young middle-class Germans in 1941, a full 8 years after the Nazi ascendance, supposedly ignorant of what was happening in their country.  In 'Downfall', when Hitler's secretary says it was only later that she realised that it was "no excuse, to be young & not to know", we assume she meant willful ignorance.  This opens as 'Friends', transposed to 1941 Berlin, where five young Germans have a party in a cafe prior to two of them leaving for the Russian front: our narrator, Wilhem Winter, is a Lieutenant in the Wehrmacht artillery; his younger brother Friedhelm is serving reluctantly under his command; Charlotte, secretly in love with WIlhelm, has enrolled as a volunteer nurse; her friend Greta wants to be the next Marlene Dietrich but is having an affair with Viktor, a Jewish tailor.  Hmmm.  This does stretch credulity, if history books are to be believed.  The so-called Final Solution hadn't yet happened but Jewish communities were being rounded up, dispossessed and generally victimised - we are told that Viktor's family have lost their shop in the Krystallnacht atrocities in 1938 - so would Germans so openly fraternise?

Once the story gets going with its three strands on the Russian front, Berlin and at a military hospital, it becomes much more compelling, and more of a tale of the effects of war on every participant.  The Winter boys face the blitzkrieg triumph turning to a literally frozen stalemate as they winter within 100km of Moscow, having witnessed brutality against civilians and eventually participated.  In the hospital, Charlotte also makes choices with fatal consequences while back in Berlin, Greta compromises herself with a Nazi to help her lover escape.

It's not unfamiliar material, and the shock of these young people at what is going on around them isn't easy to believe after years of Nazi propaganda and education, but it is good, solid drama.  It also benefits from being a German production, both for an English audience who don't recognise actors from a soap or cop show, and because Germany has to tell its own history.