Generation War

Downfall: Lucas Gregorowicz in Generation War

The thought of sitting through yet another drama set during WWII—especially one with a five-hour runtime that is in german—does not sound appealing. And in most ways, Generation War (Music Box Films) is your pretty standard WWII fare: elaborate military battles, the horrors of war, young damsels waiting at home, not to mention the constant uncertainty about who’s going to die next. But director Philipp Kadelbach’s epic was a massive hit when it was first released as the German TV miniseries Our Mothers, Our Fathers mostly because the film attempts to show the story of WWII from the perspective of the Germans. Yes, this is, in some ways, a Nazi sympathizing film—though one whose main goal, as writer Stefan Koldiz asserts, is to “have a conversation with the generations…without shameful judgments.”

It’s easy to forget that these are Nazis you’re watching. Regardless, Generation War isn’t concerned with how the German people swallowed the Nazi’s anti-Semitic line. Instead, the film focuses on how Nazi propaganda affected the generation of youths who knew nothing else. And in that regard, it’s an effective tool for humanizing the plight of Germans who found themselves in a deeply disturbed country. But then again, Generation War never delves into the uncomfortable reality of the concentration camp, making the film feel incomplete and generic. Transpose a few names and locations and this could have been a movie about the complexity of Vietnam.