"If you go to the National Mall in the US you can see monuments recording dead Americans, nowhere in the Mall is there a monument for dead Cambodians or dead Vietnamese who've been killed by Americans."
In fact, he said the US can learn from Germany. Moeller: "By establishing the Holocaust Memorial Germany made a conscious decision to incorporate the dark past into the present"Īccording to Moeller you need to only look around Berlin to immediately recognize that Germany's capital and the former seat of Nazi Germany is packed with reminders of the past: from the Jewish Museum, to the Topography of Terror and the Holocaust memorial.Īnd compared to the US, Germany has come a long way coping with its past, according to Moeller. "It's only possible to talk about more nuanced ways of the complexity of human decision making in the 1930s and 40s because of this very vibrant culture of memory that exists in so many different places in Germany today," Moeller told DW. He says it's legitimate for Germany to create more empathetic war movies because Germany already settled an important internal debate: that the Holocaust is central to Germany's national self-identity.
#Unsere mütter unsere väter movie
" The New Yorker" called it "an appeal for forgiveness," arguing "the movie sells dubious innocence in the hope of eliciting reconciliation." " The New York Times" had a similar take on it, writing: "Generation War, emotionally charged but not exactly anguished, represents an attempt to normalize German history."īut Robert Moeller, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, questions this criticism. The American media isn't happy with "Generation War" either, which is being billed as a German " Band of Brothers". Many went to the streets in Poland to protest against the series' portrayal of Polish anti-Semitism The World Association of Soldiers of the AK with its 12,000 members is now even suing ZDF for defamation. It was claimed that "Generation War" unfairly portrayed the resistance soldiers of the Polish Home Army (AK) as one-dimensional Nazis, while the five German protagonists were developed into highly complex characters. Polish media even talked about a "falsification of history" and accused Germans of becoming ignorant in their culture of remembrance. In Poland many were outraged by the series' portrayal of Polish anti-Semitism. However, the movie's reception was much different abroad.
#Unsere mütter unsere väter tv
It attracted 7.63 million viewers in Germany for its final episode, or nearly a quarter of all German TV watchers, and was especially praised for its nuanced depiction of the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Germany during World War II, for not simply juxtaposing good and evil but rather creating multi-faceted characters who are neither victims nor perpetrators. The war drama was a huge hit in Germany, chronicling the lives and war experiences of five fictional German friends - one of them a Jew - in their early twenties from 1941 to 1945. The actors (left to right): Ludwig Trepte as Viktor, Katharina Schüttler as Greta, Tom Schilling as Friedhelm, Volker Bruch as Wilhelm, and Miriam Stein as Charlotte
Ultimately the movie is supposed to be released in more than 80 countries. It was also recently broadcast on Australian national public television and BBC2 will air it later this year.
Now the three-part series, commissioned by German public broadcaster ZDF, has been picked up for release in the United States as a two-part movie, with a TV broadcast also in the works. "Generation War," or "Our Mothers, Our Fathers," as the original German title translates to, is Germany's most recent look back at its Nazi history. For a while, Germany was thought of as the world champion in remembrance and praised for working so hard to cope with its fascist past.īut a recent German film production has re-ignited the international debate over German " Vergangenheitsbewältigung," a word that was created to express how a nation comes to terms with its past. However, the way Germans cope with this past has radically changed throughout the last decades and is continuously debated and scrutinized. German schools rigorously educate about the Nazi past and it's safe to argue that Germans, no matter how old, are very much aware of their Nazi past, even nearly 70 years after the end of World War II. Early on they are confronted with the dark doings, horrors and atrocities of the Nazi regime. Germans tend to know there is no denying the past.
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