The film, which is being released in more than 80 countries, has caused particular consternation in Poland. Twenty years later, “Generation War” is reviving the debate about German victimhood not only on native soil but also abroad. “When you talk about a dead soldier with a swastika on his uniform,” he said, “the word victim comes very, very hard.” Rabbi Cooper reminded me that a German victory at Stalingrad would have only extended the continued extermination of the Jews. While researching an article on the Stalingrad bone fields that appeared in The New Yorker in February 1993, I posed this question to Rabbi Abraham Cooper at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. There had not been a single SS unit, which begged the question: Were these common German soldiers also victims of the Hitler regime and thus deserving of a proper military burial? Some still had dog tags, which meant the remains could be identified. One photograph showed a soldier whose uniform had decayed with his corpse his buttons lay in an orderly row between his ribs. Many lay where they had fallen a half century before. The surrounding fields were still littered with abandoned military arsenal and dead Germans. The sprawling battlefield had been a sealed military area since the war and opened only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Vilsmaier’s film appeared on the 50th anniversary of the German defeat at Stalingrad and amid a painful public debate over the disposition of the war dead. Der Spiegel described “Stalingrad” as “dazzling war cinema with a bad conscience.” The film closes with two soldiers huddled in a snow and gun-blasted Siberian wasteland. Unlike “Generation War,” “Stalingrad” has no survivors. Like the protagonists in “Generation War,” none is a Nazi. Like “Generation War,” “Stalingrad” opens with a handful of Germans enjoying their leisure - in this case a Wehrmacht rest center on a beach in Italy - before being transported to the nightmare world of the eastern front. Joseph Vilsmaier ventured into this same “strange queasy zone” two decades ago in another film, “Stalingrad,” that also focused on the fate of the “average” German as victim of the regime and victimizer of the rest of Europe. “The depiction of our eastern neighbors reminds me of Goebbels’ propaganda,” he wrote on a blog, invoking the Nazi-era spin-meister, Josef Goebbels.īut most of the 7.6 million Germans who watched the final episode, an impressive 24 percent of all viewers that night, welcomed a film that portrayed their “mothers” and “fathers” neither as heroes nor “monsters” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but rather as a generation in their 20s and younger subjected to systematic indoctrination and gradual “brutalization” to which they succumbed in myriad and horrific ways. A reader of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit was particularly troubled by the portrayal of Polish anti-Semitism and Soviet Army excess.
The film, which originally aired last March as a three-part series on German and Austrian television under the title, “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter,” or “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” left some Germans feeling as uneasy as A.O. The film ends with three of the five returning four years later - more than four and a half hours in cinematic time - to the war-ravaged ruins of Berlin to begin rebuilding the Germany that Angela Merkel governs today. “Generation War” traces the fates of five friends in summer 1941 Berlin cheerily toasting their departure to the eastern front with the expectation of a reunion back home by Christmas. Scott found himself in a “strange queasy zone between naturalism and nostalgia.” Another saw in it a “work of apologia.” Writing in this newspaper, A.O.
One critic sensed an attempt to continue “the self-deceiving lie” that the average German was a victim of Nazi rule. PARIS - The German mini-series “Generation War” made its American debut as a film in New York City last month to generally favorable but notably skittish reviews.