Generation War

During the late-1970s, the American television network NBC produced a kitschy sentimentalist 4-part mini-series entitled Holocaust (1978) starring Hollywood stars like Meryl Streep and James Woods that was so popular in West Germany that, as German history Alf Lüdtke wrote in his essay Coming to Terms with the Past': Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany, no less than 20 million Teutons (or about 50% of the country’s entire population) managed to see it, thereupon initiating a prevailing dialogue among post-Nazi Aryans about German culpability in the Second World War and thus ultimately demonstrating that Germans born after the war were much more susceptible to borderline tasteless propaganda of the hokey Hollywood-manufactured sort. While Holocaust more or less intrigued nearly half the entire German populous, many filmmakers associated with German New Cinema found the mini-series downright offensive, with auteur Edgar Reitz once complaining: “The difference between a scene that rings true and a scene written by commercial scriptwriters, as in HOLOCAUST, is similar to that between ‘experience’ and ‘opinion’. Opinions about events can be circulated separately, manipulated, and pushed across desk, bought and sold. Experiences, on the other hand, are tied to human beings and their faculty of memory, they become false or falsified when living details are replaced in an effort to eliminate subjectivity and uniqueness. There are thousands of stories among our people that are worth being filmed […] Authors all over the world are trying to take possession of their history […] The most serious act of expropriation occurs when people are deprived of their history. With HOLOCAUST, the Americans have taken away our history.” Luckily, Reitz and various other German filmmakers decided to respond by taking back their history by creating some of the greatest masterpieces of German New Cinema in what would be a reasonably successful campaign to counter carelessly contrived mythmaking works like Holocaust. Indeed, Reitz’s Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (1979), Alexander Kluge’s Die Patriotin (1979) aka The Patriot, and Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Germany Pale Mother (1980), among countless other films, demonstrated that Germans had their own unique perspective regarding the Second World War and that they had much more to say than a couple of Germanophobic Hebraic Hollywood producers who would not dare set one foot in the country of poets and thinkers, as well as blood and soil. Unfortunately, as the somewhat recently released ZDF-produced German mini-series Generation War (2013) aka Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (translation literally meaning “Our Mothers, Our Fathers”) makes quite clear, ethno-masochism and self-flagellation has only all the more engulfed the Teutonic Volksgeist since the release of Holocaust.

 Carefully marketed as a true and honest depiction of the Second World War from a supposedly ‘everyday German’ perspective of that time period, Generation War has been described by various moronic reviewers as everything from “pro-Nazi” to vehemently anti-Polish, yet it ultimately features much of the same sort of Zionist-produced sensational filmic feces that is routinely excreted out of Hollywood, as a work featuring a middle-aged SS officer deriving almost sexual glee from shooting a prepubescent Jewish girl for no apparent reason (in fact, the same SS man is later shown during the same episode with the kosher blood still on his neck (!), as if it was an honor for German soldiers to walk around with Jewish vital fluids on their body), as well as handsome and archetypically Aryan-looking SS officer giving his mistress a DIY abortion by punching her in the stomach as hard he can. Undoubtedly, what makes the mini-series offensive to Jews and left-wingers is that it clearly distinguishes between suavely dressed sadomasochistic Schutzstaffel psychopaths and the average and regular ‘apolitical’ Germans. A nearly 280-minute, three-part mini-series that tells the ostensibly dejecting story of five young adult friends—two brothers in the Wehrmacht, a novice nurse, an aspiring ‘diva,’ and a Jewish tailor—that meet for one last time in 1941 before going their separate ways and all experiencing a unique, if not similarly harrowing and dehumanizing, odyssey of destruction that spans a 5 year period and concludes with the capitulation of the Third Reich and the would-be-tragic deaths of two of the characters, Generation War essentially portrays the Germans as exceedingly naive  human whores that were unwittingly devoured and defecated out again by a cannibalistic Hitlerite machine with a gas chamber hidden in the back. A partially fantasy-based work where all Jews are portrayed as morally pristine supporters of Germany and a dashing Wehrmacht lieutenant hangs out with his Hebraic homey in public in 1941 as if it was common for Aryans and Jews to chill together and dance with young girls while listening to degenerate jazz music at that point in the war, the mini-series certainly sometimes borders on the absurd, so of course, it features enough sentimentalism to keep the average viewer from using their grey matter. A patently pathetic pity party without any real meaning or purpose where any sort of heroism that German soldiers may have had is completely discredited and where the average SS officer is portrayed as a sinisterly satanic sicko with an unquenchable thirst for the blood of god’s chosen tribe, Generation War is a complete abject mockery of the already relentlessly besmirched and reviled era of Aryans that it depicts and purports to tell truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about.  Of course, the series is really just a slave-morality-ridden fantasy that delights in portraying dishonor, dehumanization, desperation, and derangement, as if those are admirable qualities or something. 

 Beginning in Berlin 1941 on the eve of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Generation War is narrated by a short Lieutenant named Wilhelm Winter (Volker Bruch) of the ‘Windhund Company’ of the Wehrmacht (German army) who has already seen action in both Poland and France and is about to take his equally short brother Friedhelm (played by perennial twink Tom Schilling)—a “bookworm who loves Rimbaud and Jünger” (despite the fact he is a patent pacifist and Ernst Jünger wrote Storm of Steel (1920), which is considered the rival work to pansy Remarque's 1929 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front)—to wage war on the Eastern Front. Before leaving to destroy the Bolshevik beast in the east, Wilhelm and Friedhelm have a party with their lifelong childhood friends, which include would-be-singer Greta (Katharina Schüttler), novice nurse Charlotte aka Charley (Miriam Stein), and Jewish tailor Viktor Goldstein (Ludwig Trepte). While Charlotte is desperately in love with Wilhelm and he knows it, the soldier does not want to pursue a romantic relationship with her until after the war just in case he dies. A proud race-mixer and lover of degenerate American swing music, Greta is in a relationship with Jew Viktor, who was supposed to inherit his WWI veteran father’s tailor shop, but it was destroyed during the so-called “Night of Broken Glass” (aka Kristallnacht). Ultimately, the five friends’ last night together concludes after a super Aryan Gestapo agent named Sturmbannführer Martin Dorn (Mark Waschke) shows up and states, “I got a report of swing music with Jews.” Ultimately, Hebrew-humper Greta will become Dorn’s whore, as the barmaid uses him so she can weasel her way out of an incitement charge for playing swing music and further her career as a singer.  Indeed, despite developing a ‘Latin’ persona (she adopts the pseudonym ‘Greta Del Torres’), Greta ultimately sings for propaganda purposes on the Eastern Front. 

 Of course, it does not take long for the five friends to have their illusions regarding the 1000-year Reich destroyed. While Wilhelm is at first a highly respected lieutenant that has the complete allegiance of his men, he eventually becomes so completely disillusioned with the war after his entire platoon is eventually exterminated that he becomes a deserter, thus resulting in his arrest by Feldgendarmerie officers and sentence to death for treason, though he is eventually punished with being forced to become a member of a Strafbattalion (Penal Battalion) instead since Germany is losing the war and cannot afford to waste soldiers. Despite being initially an idealistic pacifist who hates the war and is even beaten up for cowardice and cynicism by his comrades, Friedhelm eventually becomes a cold and calculating, if not pathetic, killer, though he is almost killed at one point after being mistaken for a Russian soldier (he temporarily puts on a Red Army uniform to escape from a building that has been taken over by the Soviets). Luckily, Charlotte, who is a nurse on the Eastern Front, manages to save Friedhelm from a seemingly certain death. Believing Wilhelm is dead after being told such by Friedhelm, who could have sworn he saw his brother killed, Charlotte starts screwing the middle-aged head doctor at the field hospital she works at. After discovering that a middle-aged woman that she has hired to volunteer at the hospital, Lilja (Christiane Paul), is actually a Jew, Charlotte feels betrayed and gets the crypto-Judaic arrested. Meanwhile, Greta gets her fiendish fuckbuddy Dorn to create fake identity papers for Viktor so he can escape Germany, but the Gestapo agent betrays her and has her Jewish boyfriend shipped in a cattle car to a concentration camp, though the clever Hebrew manages to escape on the way upon learning that Jews are being slaughtered like lambs and he eventually joins up with some Polish partisans who are even more anti-Semitic than the SS, so he continues to shield his true identity. In the end, Wilhelm manages to survive the war by killing his sadistic Strafbattalion leader and heading back to Germany on foot, Friedhelm becomes an executioner/protégé of a Svengali SD officer named Hiemer (played by Sylvester Groth, who is best known for playing Goebbels in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009)) and later sacrifices himself to save a unit of Volkssturm soldiers that is largely comprised of young Hitler Youth boys, Charlotte is raped by a Soviet savage after her field hospital is overrun by bestial bolsheviks yet she manages to survive after the noble Jewess she once betrayed, Lilja, shows up as a Soviet officer and spares her life, Greta is imprisoned after telling Dorn’s wife about their affair and committing ‘Wehrkraftzersetzung’ (“subversion of the war effort”) and is later executed for her crimes, and Viktor manages to survive both the Nazis and Polish partisans. At the conclusion of Generation War, the three surviving friends—Wilhelm, Charlotte, and Viktor—meet back at the same bar they did in 1941 for a mostly melancholy reunion, with Germany being in complete ruins and Americans GIs occupying ever corner. In a major “fuck you” to the United States and its hypocritical utilization of Nazis after the Second World War (most infamously, during 'Project Paperclip'), it is revealed that SS officer Dorn, who punched his pregnant mistress Greta in the stomach before sentencing her to death, has been hired by American GIs, who are well aware about his infamous past, to work as a bureaucrat for the new ‘democratic’ West German government. 

 Undoubtedly, you know a film is plagued by self-loathing and self-pity, meekness and weakness, and spiritual castration when an American film like Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977), which is firmly anti-Nazi, manages to do a much better job at least portraying some Germans as stoic war heroes with titanic testicular fortitude. Indeed, Generation War seems like a pathetic plea created by a group of culturally cuckolded krauts who want to join the cult of victimhood like so many so-called minorities have. Seen by no less than 7 million German households when it premiered in 2013, this sub-middlebrow mini-series has now guaranteed that a whole new generation of Germans will go on looking at their grandparents and great-grandparents (why they absurdly decided to name the series “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” aka “Our Mothers, Our Fathers” is a complete mystery to me) as moronic cowards and opportunists who were easily duped into going to hell and back by a rather unimpressive dude with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. Undoubtedly, one of the worst lies associated with the mini-series is that it ostensibly does something revolutionary by depicting WWII from a reasonably objective perspective, yet this was already done many decades ago and in a much more intelligent and artistically merited fashion by auteur filmmakers associated with German New Cinema like Fassbinder, Syberberg, Reitz, and even a feminist like Sanders-Brahms and a Marxist like Kluge. What makes Generation War even more repellant than it already is, is that it feebly attempts to associate itself with the grand legacy of German history, as is especially apparent in a scene where a portrait of German expressionist master auteur F.W. Murnau appears briefly. Of course, the mini-series is really the putrid pansy production of self-loathing krauts that were bred on a steady diet of Hollywood swill growing up and have watched too many episodes of Band of Brothers (2001). Of course, the series also panders to Jews, with its token Jewish character Viktor and unflattering depiction of Polack partisans as bigger Heeb-haters than the Nazis themselves being quite blatant examples of this. 

 A ‘major event’ mini-series that is more or less as aesthetically and historically worthless as ABC’s Holocaust, Generation War is just more proof that the Germans will always be consumed with guilt and will never get over the Second World War, at least not anytime during this century. For anyone who wants to see a truly epic and truly Teutonic film that takes a sincere approach to German twentieth century history and the troubled relationships between different generations of Germans, you can probably do no better than Edgar Reitz’s mega-neo-Heimat movie Heimat, which begins with a shot of a boulder with the words “Made in Germany” engraved on it for good reason. Generation War, on the other hand, might as well begin with an inter-title reading, “Made in kraut cuckoldland where the spirit of Spielberg trumped Syberberg and where guilt is as good as gold.” Indeed, like a German Gone with the Wind where Scarlett O'Hara opts for suicide instead of bravely fighting on, Generation War depicts the physical and spiritual annihilation of an entire people, yet begs for shallow pity and contempt in the end instead of demanding the German people fight on, which is a sentiment that no one can truly respect, not even the perennially defeated Polacks in Poland or the dying Khoisan in South Africa. 

-Ty E