The Wehrmachtsausstellung, a traveling exhibition detailing the crimes of "ordinary" German soldiers, was a media sensation in the 1990s. This fits in with the larger reexamination of the attitudes and actions of German soldiers that took place in the 1990s.
Friedhelm's silent conformity in war crimes takes place in spite of his cultured background and self-awareness. One of the stock tropes in FRG war films in the 1950s was the Cassandra-like pastor who warns the military protagonists that their bravery and soldierly honor is in service to an un-Christian regime. Good Germans in these postwar narratives were aghast at Nazism's inhumanity and departure from cultured society. This was a departure in German media because it typically depicted German culture as being something of an insulator against Nazism. This allows one of the stronger character arcs of the miniseries to come to the foreground: Friedhelm Winter's.įriedhelm's arc is that he is a skeptic of Nazism and archetypical German poet and thinker, yet he becomes the one of the five main characters who is most enmeshed in the crimes of Nazism. Films like Stalingrad portrayed German defeat as a sort of Germanic Stations of the Cross where German soldiers have a brief, but concentrated suffering. This timeframe manages to lend greater focus onto German hopes for victory and the prolonged agony of defeat. Most German depictions of the Eastern Front in either the FRG or unified Germany tended to focus on Stalingrad to the exclusion of other aspects of the campaign. The film's skipping of 1942 also means it covers two aspects of the Eastern Front underserved in German media, the invasion of Barbarossa and the post-Stalingrad defeats. This is important because this was the corner of the war that a good many Germans experienced. Anglo-American forces are referenced in the first episodes, but American troops only show up twice in the final episode. One merit the miniseries has working in its favor is that it is almost exclusively an Eastern Front experience. However, there are other components of the plot and character that both ring false and recapitulate some problematic historical conventions. There are some aspects of the miniseries that are rather novel and depart from other German cinematic depictions of the war experience. The ZDF miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (Our Mothers, Our Fathers/ Generation War in the US) is a very mixed bag as far as historical accuracy is concerned.
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