Inevitably it will use the conventions of mainstream cinema, including the generic conventions of the combat picture and home-front melodrama. It is intended as popular entertainment on mainstream television. Again, the academics agreed that the events shown did have a historical basis but that they weren’t representative of the whole experience – and yes it wasn’t possible to cover the whole war in 4.5 hours! My argument is simple, let’s discuss this fascinating mini-series as a long-form film narrative. The second major issue raised was the depiction of the Poles, Ukrainians and Russians in the film and specifically their treatment of Jews. Its artistic intention is to engage younger Germans in an exploration of what their parents and grandparents might have experienced. Of course, he is right and that’s why the film needs to be discussed as a modern drama, not a historical reconstruction. He also admitted that it was impossible to represent characters from the 1940s in a modern drama in an historically accurate way. Richard Evans, while asserting that the film was not plausible in historical terms, noted that it was as if five young Germans from today had been parachuted into the events of 1941-45. The programme also included some brief interviews with two writers but my main problem with the discussion was that no one was prepared to discuss the film ‘as a film’ and there was no other filmmaker’s voice apart from the producer Benjamin Benedict. The discussion was intelligent and stimulating and the three academics, specialists in this period, historians Richard Evans and David Cesarani and writer/literature professor Eva Hoffman, all expressed their agreement on how well-made and exciting the film was as well as the range of problems it raised in terms of the history of East/Central Europe during the Second World War.
This strategy was once fairly common on the BBC after controversial films or television productions but this is the first time (that I can remember) when a foreign language production received this kind of attention. The discussion was chaired by Martha Kearney, a regular presenter of cultural programming on the channel. Volker Bruch as Wilhelm, the narrator of the storyĪfter the final episode of Generation War, BBC2 in the UK offered a discussion of the series by three distinguished academics alongside the series producer.
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