Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation: Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter and the Politics of Emotion
LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER Gettysburg College
When the ZDF miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter aired in March 2013, promoters and critics heralded it as the German television event of the year. Beginning in 1941, before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the miniseries relays the story of five friends, all in their early twenties – two Wehrmacht soldiers (Wilhelm and Friedhelm), one singer (Greta), one newly charged front nurse (Charlotte), and one Jew (Viktor) – who promise on the eve of different deploy- ments to reunite in Berlin when the war is over, “bis Weihnachten.” In the course of three instalments and 270 minutes, the miniseries graphically depicts the hor- rors of the eastern front, a conquest that was neither swift nor successful, and the emotional and moral devastation of its protagonists. The miniseries concludes in 1945 with the promised reunion, albeit under circumstances far from those once imagined. Its promotional campaign credits the film with introducing a new phase in processing the collective trauma Germans incurred through their experi- ences in the Second World War: namely, by bringing to life the war generation, full of youth, hopes, and dreams, it facilitates an intergenerational dialogue to break the “silence” on family involvement in war crimes and National Socialism and on the trauma incurred by soldiers (Hempel, “Fernsehereignis”; on cultural trauma, see Alexander; on collective silence, see Giesen; Heimannsberg and Schmidt). Drawing on average more than seven million viewers per episode, the media event clearly struck a nerve in the German psyche, begging the question to what extent hype and fact indeed converge. While the Second World War has been depicted in German film and televi- sion throughout the decades, its representation has reflected evolving stages of working through the German past, the different identity politics of East and West Germany, and shifting generational perspectives borne out through time (see Cooke and Silberman). Within this chronology, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter ap- pears at a point when cultural representations of non-Jewish German suffering in the Second World War are flooding the market (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder- Skinner; Taberner and Berger; Schmitz). As the last members of the war genera- tion die, these representations not only furnish visual or literary entertainment but also provide a social platform for today’s generations of Germans to discuss publicly their nation’s past. The memory debates they fuel reflect tensions between transnational and national memory narratives and the political dimen- sions of who and what is included in the construction of the national imaginary. seminar 50:1 (February 2014) Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 105
They document a move towards a history that is felt, towards a story that allows an emotional connection with familial experiences of the Second World War (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner 3–23; von Moltke, “Sympathy” 17). In what has been called the “shift from 1968 to 1989” (von Moltke, “Sympathy” 20), these cultural representations of German suffering in the war make German victimhood alongside the Holocaust a competing, if controversial, national narra- tive since unification (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner; Taberner and Ber- ger; Schmitz). Since their constructions of the German war experience both reflect and influence public attitudes, their constitutive role in the memory poli- tics of the Federal Republic warrants examination. Proclamations that Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter begins yet a new phase in working through a collective German trauma (Schirrmacher) refer to the programmatic emotionalization of the German war experience that consciously skirts conventional didactic discussions on questions of guilt and shame. Just as the American miniseries Holocaust once made Jewish suffering first “real” and “feelable” to German audiences in the late 1970s, so, too – in this thinking – the German miniseries makes the traumatization of ageing parents and grandparents first palpable for their descendants (Hofmann, “Töten”). The miniseries stands, however, in a long line of cultural representations of German victimhood that constitute the “current pervasive emotional turn in Germany’s media landscape” (von Moltke, “Politics” 234), thus tempering radical pronouncements of taboo- breaking. More accurately, one could speak of an intentional suspension of moral judgement on the war generation in order to reclaim its emotional experi- ence of life under National Socialism, indeed, in order to imbue it with life. Cen- tral to the film’s success is the intimacy with which it portrays generational perspectives on the war, allowing the film to speak for the (grand)parents in an intergenerational dialogue. Thus, the film’s production design, promotional cam- paign, and, to a certain extent, response in the media construct the sense that finally something is expressed on an emotional level that has been socially and privately suppressed for decades. In this vein, this study outlines the memory machinations surrounding the film by contextualizing its production, promotion, and reception in the German media within the politics of emotion that undergirds the genre of historical docu- drama. Doing so crystallizes the film’s contribution to memory debates on Ger- man victimhood and a “national” memory founded in private, family narratives of wartime suffering. In his study of docudramatization, Tobias Ebbrecht notes that “the subjective perspective of German event television and docudrama,” with its blurring of fiction and reality, corresponds with “forms of collective and family memory in Germany,” as neither “‘distinguish[es] as accurately in fiction and reality as science does.’ Television and other media ‘manifest apparently authentic but in reality highly artificial perspectives on events and become mod- els for the interpretation of how something happened’” (“Docudramatizing” 49, citing Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 105). Media pronouncements (from the production team or reviewers) that the film is historically accurate, even as it 106 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER represents generational experiences of the war from the subjective perspective of that very generation, underscore a political volatility inherent when emotion mixes with what is viewed as truth. Considering the formative power of televi- sion and media events on understandings of the past, the docudrama’s determina- tion of “how it really was” figures in social contestations on which histories will be remembered and how. Its representation of the war generation and its experi- ences reflects the production team’s intent to invoke empathy with the perpetra- tors or contestations on how the events are portrayed. The memory politics that come to light speak to the reification of what Johannes von Moltke has termed a “romantic nationalism” (“Sympathy” 18) in process since unification. They highlight continuing tensions between historical consciousness and emotional engagement on the German past in Germany today.
Making the War Generation Come Alive: The Docudrama between Authenticity and Emotion In his study “Codes and Conventions of Dramadoc and Docudrama,” Derek Paget sees the genre’s affective power in “a distinctively twentieth-century faith in images – especially moving ones” (206). Ebbrecht, in suit, aligns the docudra- ma’s signature blending of documentary and fictional modes of representation with “the audience’s desire to see their own received understanding of history confirmed by historical evidence” (“Docudramatizing” 40). It follows that what is depicted plays to a faith in moving images as “representatives for historical truth” and the desire to “see how historic events took place” (40). Paul Cooke sees in these aesthetics a strategy to construct “an emotional bridge between the past events on the screen and the experience of the viewing audience” (555–56; see also Ebbrecht, “Docudramatizing” 50). The docudrama thereby signals through this emotive technique “the continued relevance of this past event for the present- day viewer” (Cooke 555). The brainchild of producer Nico Hofmann (born 1959), Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter clearly displays these aesthetics. The film spawns directly from Hofmann’s teamWorx television hit Dresden (2006), itself eventful in its fictio- nalization of the Allied bombings and their aftermath. Positive public resonance to Dresden inspired Hofmann, along with ZDF director of fiction Heike Hempel and scriptwriter Stefan Kolditz, to continue the story of the Second World War’s effect on Germans – this time, however, not in the melodramatic style of Dres- den but rather “mit einer anderen Authentizität” (Hofmann, “Krieg”). Though the miniseries supposedly breaks with melodrama in order to deliver historical “reality,” its representation of this history clearly shares techniques of the histori- cal docudrama perfected in other teamWorx productions of the last decade, such as Die Flucht (2007), Die Luftbrücke (2005), and the aforementioned Dresden. Docudrama’s focus on ordinary citizens in extraordinary events – in Unsere Müt- ter, unsere Väter youthful, ordinary Germans during the losing years of the Sec- ond World War – encourages viewers to identify with the main characters (Paget 196–97), to feel for and with them, and to agree with their view on historical Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 107 events (von Moltke, “Politics” 243). Its mixing of authentic newsreel footage of battle scenes with dramatic reconstructions heightens the sense of immediacy by making the viewers feel as if they were actually there and connecting them empathetically with the past (Cooke 555; also Ebbrecht, “Docudramatizing” 49). Employing these techniques, the docudrama extends, in other words, the invita- tion to feel history (von Moltke, “Politics” 242–43; “Sympathy”; Ebbrecht, “His- tory”). More explicitly, it asks viewers to empathize with the parents or grandparents whose lives it aims to depict. Its title overtly declares the story’s relevance to present-day viewers: not just another interpretation of the German experience in the Second World War, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter claims to get real and personal because it represents family. It proves easy to identify with Greta, Wilhelm, Friedhelm, Viktor, and Char- lotte: beautiful and vibrant in their youth, they distinguish themselves – even in moments of moral crisis – from the Nazis portrayed as brutal and uncultured. The young protagonists speak in the vernacular of the present (not that of the 1940s); they look and act young and are thereby identifiable to today’s audience (see Scheer). The opening scene works to separate the five friends from the evils of National Socialism, both figuratively and literally. As the group secretly gath- ers to celebrate their friendship after hours in the bar where Greta works, Greta demonstratively locks the outside door to isolate (and protect) them. Their festive communion establishes their inherently moral core, for the four non-Jews remain loyal to their Jewish friend Viktor, even though the law prohibits it. Further, they form a united front against the Nazi officer who tries to break up their gathering. The friends are thus instantly framed to experience as fated participants their moral corruption through the political events that follow: Wilhelm will go off as a Wehrmacht officer to the eastern front, be ordered to commit war crimes, and eventually desert; Friedhelm, his brother, will reluctantly join him and over time, as his spirit dies, transform from bookworm into killing machine; Greta will betray her lover Viktor with an SS officer – partly to procure emigration papers for Viktor but mostly to further her budding singing career; Charlotte will serve as a nurse on the front and denounce a Jewish colleague. Only Viktor, the Jewish protagonist, will not lose himself through collaborating with the Nazi regime; the actions he takes to survive the Holocaust, however, will force him to fight and kill within the Polish underground. Friedhelm’s proclamation, “der Krieg wird nur das Schlechteste in uns zum Vorschein bringen,” guides the representa- tion of their fall: it is not the characters who are primarily responsible for the ac- tions they take; it is the war with its own will that will destroy them all. The film never addresses how the non-Jewish figures reconcile their active participation in the Third Reich with their friendship with Viktor. Typical of the genre of historical docudrama, both the production techniques and promotional campaigns aim towards selling historical authenticity. Screenplay writer Stephan Kolditz (born 1956), who worked on the script for six years, con- ducted extensive research – devouring war diaries, military analyses, Soviet no- vels, and even books about the Vietnam War in order to accurately portray the 108 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER military events that unfold in the film (Scheer). The filmmakers employed military experts and over two hundred war veterans as advisers (Cordes). In the film, the use of voice-over, through Wilhelm’svoice,“a convention that [. . .] docudrama shares with documentary more than drama” (Paget 198) helps communicate this authenticity by providing non-diegetically historical, factual information to con- textualize the storyline. The miniseries is supported by supplemental authentic ma- terials. Two sets of ZDF documentation found on the official film website relay the fates of actual people similar to the film’s protagonists: front soldiers, a Jew who survived in hiding, a field nurse, and an actress (“Eine andere Zeit”). The message is that although Wilhelm, Friedhelm, Charlotte, Greta, and Viktor are fic- tional characters, their stories are true, as validated by real stories in the documen- tation. The listing of birth and death years for the five protagonists at the end of the miniseries further blurs the lines between fiction and reality, prompting the viewer to suspend belief in the fictionality of the portrayed figures and events and to ascribe to them an historical authenticity. Paradoxically, however, it is the subjective “German” perspective on living the brutality of the Second World War, complete with its seemingly upstanding young protagonists who come to discard basic human values, that brings acco- lades for showing the National Socialist era “wie es wirklich war” (e.g. Fuhr). Intended as a true-to-life and intimate look into the lives of young Germans and how they witnessed the final years of the National Socialist regime, the film nar- rates “von innen heraus” (Scheer), from the viewpoint of its young protagonists, who seem destroyed by a system they did not create. Such a portrayal of this generation outside moral categories of right or wrong seeks to make the disinte- gration of moral action for the young, wartime generation emotionally accessi- ble. Their at times abhorrent decisions for personal gain or self-survival (excepting Viktor, who remains the only morally upright figure) are presented as evolving from the situation, without today’s hindsight or moral commentary. The result lets viewers share the perspective of young (non-Jewish) Germans raised in National Socialism, allowing them to walk the era’s events in their shoes. In essence, the film intends to portray authentically the thoughts and feel- ings of a generation now lost to time. At first conflicted about emotionally identi- fying with ambivalent figures he calls “Nazis, Wehrmachtsoldaten, Menschen, die sich moralisch beschädigen und schlimme Dinge tun,” director Philipp Ka- delbach (born 1974) nonetheless defends the alliance. While the actions of this generation remain reprehensible, he states, it becomes possible to grasp why they behaved as they did. ZDF’s Heike Hempel (born 1965) credits the film with being the first to show “die Perspektive derer, die mit damals 20 Jahren in den Krieg geschickt wurden” (qtd. in Cordes). While individual and individualized, the figures nonetheless intend to repre- sent the spectrum of German youth in the early 1940s. Seen through their eyes, therefore, the story of the Soviet offensive and the gradual collapse of the Nazi regime assumes a collective eyewitness status. The inescapable devastation of each individual’s spirit through the war machine unifies their different stories, Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 109 thus corroborating what each protagonist undergoes on her or his own and vali- dating it for the whole: the will of the war is greater than the will of the indi- vidual, and the war leaves no one undamaged. Historical reality is privately witnessed; the hopes and fears of the historical contemporary, i.e. the emotional backdrop, complete the story of what really happened. This process makes his- tory come alive for the children and grandchildren of the war generation. Drawing on the emotional intimacy invoked by American visual representa- tions of the war’s horrors for American soldiers, the filmmakers seek to break ground for comparable filmic narrations of the German experience. While the violence it depicts reaches a new level for German television (see Kellerhoff ), the fighting scenes further the psychological development of the characters. Ac- cording to producer Hofmann, they serve solely to narrate the effects of war on people (“Krieg”). Close-up images of executions and gory battle scenes aim to give immediacy to the events as the figures experience them. Oriented on the aesthetic of films like Saving Private Ryan or the television series Band of Broth- ers, the miniseries endeavours to differentiate its portrayal of war from that of previous German war films (e.g. Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben by Frank Wisbar [1959] und Stalingrad by Joseph Vilsmaier [1993]) by making the battle scenes feel foreign yet intimate at the same time (Kellerhoff; see also Fuhr; Scheer). The film wants to narrate the war “amerikanisch”: mercilessly, “mit der ganzen Ambivalenz” (Hempel, “Wir führen”), thus creating a level of directness un- known to German films on the war (Kellerhoff). That the Americans can create evocative productions, though, rests on their ability to talk about the Second World War, admits Kadelbach. Whether speaking programmatically or for Ger- mans in general is unclear, but Hempel accordingly avows: “Wir wollen ähnlich fulminant vom Zweiten Weltkrieg erzählen wie die Amerikaner” (qtd. in Han- feld). In saying so, she does recognize that Americans and Germans draw on dif- ferent narratives: Americans have their stories of heroes, and Germans, as the generation of perpetrators, their tales of young people who supported the Nazi regime or became its victims (Hanfeld). Still, the contemporary visuals of battle scenes should make the war come alive for a young audience (Cordes), even to the extent that “[w]er jetzt jung ist, soll die Perspektive von damals einnehmen können” (Hempel, “Wir führen”). The film’s primary objective is “die emotio- nale Reise” on which it wants to send its viewers (Scheer). As its producer Hof- mann sets forth, drawing on historian Joachim Fest to bolster his position: “Wir wissen unheimlich viele Fakten, aber wo ist die Emotion dahinter?” (“Töten”). With its programmatic push for empathy, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter banks on striking a nerve with German families whose parents or grandparents were similarly young during the last years of the Third Reich. Inserting senti- ment into historically known facts ostensibly lands in the “Raum zwischen den emotiven und kognitiven Dimensionen des Geschichtsbewusstseins” (Welzer and Lenz 11), between that which later generations know of the war through their families and that which they know through years of education on the past. In production terms, the empathy with the young war generation that the film 110 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER promotes, indeed, the invitation to see life in the Third Reich through the eyes of this generation, becomes politically permissible because it evolves from a pur- portedly historically faithful representation of that history. Against criticism that the film too subjectively portrays the viewpoints of a generation socialized in National Socialist ideology, Kadelbach counters that the film does not relativize German perpetrators (“Wir verharmlosen nichts. Zivilisten, Frauen, Kinder wer- den ermordet, den guten Wehrmachtssoldaten gibt es nicht”). His defence says much, however, about the film’s ideological positioning: the film is a German perspective, a German story; he maintains, “[E]s ist kein Film aus der Perspek- tive anderer Nationen.”
Visions of Victimhood: Constructing the Collective So defined, the memory politics of the miniseries play to an exclusionary under- standing of Germanness that omits the family histories of persecuted or minority populations just as it overtly rejects transnational perspectives on the Second World War and the Holocaust. The film directs its affective charge to a national imaginary of ethnic Germans whose family histories share the story of fighting on the eastern front, living through the bombardment of German cities, or experi- encing flight or expulsion – i.e. non-Jewish German family histories of suffering and traumatization not from National Socialism but because of it. The inclusion of a Jewish protagonist seems on the surface to broaden this exclusionary nar- rative of Germanness. However, Viktor, like other Jewish figures in the film, serves more to ambiguate the “traumatization” of the non-Jewish German char- acters than to diversify the representation of who is German. While the film superficially attempts to acknowledge German Jewish suffering as part of a national narrative of trauma, it fails to integrate it successfully. When the five friends plan at the outset to reunite at the end of 1941 – by Christmas – it is not with hopes that the Nazi dictatorship will have ended by Christmas, thus liberat- ing Viktor from the oppressive social marginalization he endures, which in actu- ality prohibits this friendship. Instead, their hopes and dreams hinge on the quick and successful resolution of the war against Russia. Unaddressed remains the question: if “home by Christmas” (a curious time marker, since it is without sig- nificance for Jews) means the rapid completion of Nazi expansion plans to the East, what does that mean for their friend Viktor? Viktor’s otherness is signalled early: in order to furnish a portrait of Viktor for a false passport, Greta cuts out his image from the one photo she has of him, a group portrait taken on the cele- bratory evening the five friends convene for the last time. The mutilated photo depicts the actual “mothers” and “fathers” circumscribed in the title: it is the gen- eration of bystanders, collaborators, and perpetrators whose lives form the col- lective narrative of the film. Viktor’s struggles as a Jew, like that of other Jews portrayed against the backdrop of the Holocaust in the film, take place outside the collective: Viktor is excluded from the picture. The film likewise says noth- ing of those excluded and persecuted for other reasons, e.g. their sexuality, their ethnicity, or their mental capacity. Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 111
The film’s promotional campaign effectively acknowledges the collective intended against the film’s own half-hearted attempts to include Jewish narra- tives. ZDF’s editorial preface to the film points to “Schmerz, Schuld und Schwei- gen” as consequences of the collective trauma of the Second World War that continue to play out in “unzählige Familiengeschichten” in the present day. The effects, it notes – citing current research to bolster its argument – are felt not only by the wartime generation but also by their children and grandchildren. The miniseries seeks to encourage and facilitate an intergenerational exchange “über das Verschüttete, das Verdrängte und Unaussprechliche,” which it defines as “die Parteizugehörigkeit der Großeltern, das Album des Vaters mit verstörenden Bildern vom Russlandfeldzug oder die blutigen Erinnerungen der Kinder an die letzten Kriegstage im Volkssturm”–on top of the stories of rape, bombings, combat, starvation, flight, and expulsion. The story is, the production team pro- claims, the story of every German family, affecting every German born after 1945, either in the East or the West, for “ob hüben oder drüben, die Geschichte der Eltern und Großeltern ist die gleiche” (Hofmann, “Krieg”). The commonality of experience extends also to the generation of actors, the production team em- phasizes. Producer Hofmann declares that when they play their grandfathers, it does not matter that Tom Schilling (who plays Friedhelm) grew up in the Ger- man Democratic Republic and Volker Bruch (who plays Wilhelm) in the West: “Da ist gemeinsame Geschichte. Es ist ein deutscher Film. Und es gibt natürlich eine Transferleistung zwischen den Generationen” (Hofmann, “Es ist nie vor- bei”). It is no coincidence, the editorial preface concludes, that the film appears at a moment in history when the very last members of the generation whose youth it portrays are still alive (“Zeitgeschichte”). Only now, so it infers, when so little time remains – or perhaps precisely because of that – is the search for the answers to unanswered questions critical and possible. Despite a title that proclaims the story of the nation’s parents, the film refer- ences a narrative of German suffering and victimhood, founded in non-Jewish German experiences of the Third Reich and Second World War, that has re- emerged and solidified since unification (see Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder- Skinner; Taberner and Berger) – a narrative that addresses the family histories of large segments of the German population but not all. Where Unsere Mütter, un- sere Väter programmatically seeks to expand this narrative is by portraying the darker side of this suffering: the complicity and guilt of the (grand)parents – yet not in the moralizing tone of the 1968ers but rather without judgement and with compassion. Doing so, as the production team alleges, induces finally a collec- tive mourning or intergenerational dialogue on understanding all experiences of the Third Reich and Second World War, and the legacy of silence about the (grand)parents’ perpetration of war crimes and their support of the National Socialist regime can thus at last be broken, the gaps in family myths filled in. The production team witnesses a collective need for such confessional dialogue by citing its own family dynamics: Kadelbach admits that his grandfather, a Wehrmacht soldier, never talked about the Nazi era with his son, Kadelbach’s 112 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER father, who wanted to know about the war (Pohlmann). Kolditz, the son of the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) director Gottfried Kolditz, says that with regard to his father’s front-line trauma he knew only that he was almost beaten to death when he purposely failed the officer’s exam; with his father now deceased, he wonders about the stories his father chose not to share (Scheer). Hofmann, who ascribes to his work “etwas Missionarisches” (“Töten”), sees the film as an attempt to understand his father, who left for the eastern front at eigh- teen and returned as a pacifist; his mother, a Bund deutscher Mädel (BdM) mem- ber and Hitler fan, needed years following the war to come to terms with losing the “Führer.” The film, he discloses, facilitated “aktive Trauerarbeit” for both father and son (“Es ist nie vorbei”) because it prompted his father to share feel- ings and memories he had repressed for decades (“Töten”). Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich’s groundbreaking work on post- Reich Germans’“inability to mourn” because of their involvement in the National Socialist regime – and the transference of this numbness and silence to their heirs (see also Ermann, Pflichthofer, and Kamm 225–26; Fuchs, Krüger, and Goboda-Madikizela) – is given new relevance in the film’s promotion of working through a collective German trauma. Its final scene, in which the three surviving protagonists (Wilhelm, Viktor, and Charlotte) reconvene at the ap- pointed spot – only fours years later than expected, following a total devastation to land and spirit – seeks to convey the trauma this generation suppressed in order to function and rebuild (see Schirrmacher). Gone is the youth in their movements, and all gaiety or hope in their eyes and expressions. Charlotte and Wilhelm, who once secretly pined for each other, have no love left to give; Vik- tor – alive against all historical odds – stands opposite his “friends,” discon- nected by his experiences in surviving the regime his childhood playmates inevitably helped to support, and a mirror to their guilt. All this would seem to point to a remarkably new and differentiated por- trayal of young Germans socialized in Nazi ideology who, despite their basically good natures, go on to commit brutal acts and sell their souls, so to speak, for the sake of National Socialism. To return to the politics of emotion that filters the representation of these protagonists, however, the historical knowledge of these atrocities is allowed only to the extent that it does not destabilize the affective engagement with the perpetrators, i.e. the viewers’ ability to identify and connect with them as “their” parents or grandparents. Despite the fact that the protago- nists (except Viktor) all become guilty, all likewise become victims of the war, and all of them oppose the National Socialist regime to some degree (see Her- bert). Wilhelm, the deserter, is captured and assigned to a punitive battalion that forces him to burn Russian villages and kill civilians; he ends up murdering the officer who orders such brutal attacks. Friedhelm’s war offences abound, yet he ultimately kills an SS officer to save Viktor and later dies willingly to save a bat- talion of young Volkssturm fighters. Charlotte’s denunciation of a Jewish col- league is countered with being raped when Soviet soldiers take over the hospital. Greta’s aforementioned Faustian pact with an SS officer offers no help when she Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 113 is arrested for publicly expressing doubts about the Endsieg and executed in the final days of the war. Worth noting is that the two most tainted figures, Greta and Friedhelm, die – the former through a state execution and the latter through self-sacrifice. As one critic notes, “Solche Eltern hätte man nicht gewollt. Also haben sie (im Film) nicht überlebt” (Michal). The accompanying ZDF documen- tation also fails to include people who parallel the characters of Greta and Fried- helm, i.e. those who have Nazi lovers or commit horrible crimes (see Michal). Even Frank Schirrmacher, whose praise otherwise knows no bounds, observes that the sympathetic young people portrayed could indeed be “our” parents or grandparents: “ein wirklicher Nazi ist nicht unter ihnen.” The film sustains therefore the image of parents and grandparents in German families that sociologists Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschugg- nall ascertained in their 2002 study Opa war kein Nazi: although descendants of the war generation are familiar with the German crimes in the Holocaust and the Second World War, few truly believe their own families contain former Nazis. As in the film, so, too, in the self-portrait of German families, the Nazis are the others. Friedhelm’s proclamation that “der Krieg wird nur das Schlechteste in uns zum Vorschein bringen” applies universally to experiences of violence and survival that test the limits of human behaviour in any war. Contextualized within the film’s representation of “ordinary” young Germans in the last years of the Second World War, however, the prophecy functions to exonerate. In the end, no one – not even Viktor, so the premise – can elude the destruction of mor- als and principles, so easily upheld in civilized society, that war and chaos bring. Problematic in this interpretation is, of course, the elision of Nazi ideology, with its emphasis on racial superiority and imperialist expansionism. It is only the war, not the eight years already spent growing up under Nazi ideals, that will pervert and destroy the protagonists. While the film associates the generation of parents/grandparents with the crimes committed under National Socialism, it re- deems them nonetheless by differentiating them from sadistic, anti-Semitic National Socialist Party members. By not impeding an emotional connection to the war generation, the film thus allows the inclusion of “silenced” memories into the generational history of nation and family because, while terrible, they still do not implicate the (grand)parents as Nazis.
Debating Guilt, Suffering, and Victimhood: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the Media Produced and marketed as a television event, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter gener- ated the media attention that has come to accompany popular German docudra- mas, particularly those produced by teamWorx (Cooke 541). The hefty media reaction it engendered, witnessed alone by debates played out in both national and international newspaper reviews, points to the ability of such an event to dominate public discourse and influence memory debates. Like the film’s pro- duction and promotion, the film’s reception is also marked by a politics of emo- tion in which differing memory politics on German guilt and victimhood come 114 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER to light. The conflict between historical consciousness and a conscious emotional engagement with the past that marks the film itself thus also filters large seg- ments of its review. The debates illuminate the political manifestations of repre- senting war in a German film from a German perspective when memories on this past differ. Further, they show that – despite the inclusion of the Jewish figure Viktor in the war generation – Jews are still excluded from the national imagery in discourses on “German” suffering; the discourse on German trauma continues to define itself as non-Jewish German suffering. Within the German press, the film’s critical reception highlights public con- testations over how and whether and to what degree narratives of non-Jewish German suffering and narratives of German guilt and responsibility can or should coexist. That histories of trauma and suffering have always inscribed the family memory of many Germans after the war, despite an official memory of the Holocaust and German responsibility from the 1970s into the new millen- nium, has been documented in recent sociological studies (Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall). Positive reviews that underscore the victimhood discourse pro- moted by the miniseries – e.g. a narrative of traumatization that crosses genera- tions into the present – are therefore constitutive of social dynamics in Germany since unification that allow such family memories to have a public presence. Pos- itive in their appraisal, such reviews ally with production assertions that the min- iseries gives voice to “eine verlorene Generation” (Kellerhoff). While the miniseries purportedly portrays the trauma of this generation against the back- drop of its guilt and complicity, the expression of its psychological and emo- tional wounding is foregrounded in reviews that herald the film as a social success, thus in accord with the emotional politics that underlie this docudrama. The film’s intent to tell the story of the war generation “von innen heraus,” i.e. from a subjective viewpoint that makes feelable why the war generation did the things it did (see Kadelbach), elicits to some extent different reactions from left- and right-leaning presses. Whereas more conservative presses tend to credit the film with finally depicting what lay behind the “silence” of this generation on its experience of National Socialism and the Second World War, hence are laden with more emotion, more liberal presses place to some extent the discussion in the context of German guilt and responsibility for the suffering of others. Since in framing their critique both sides reference gaps in family memory – the pur- ported representation of the film – the polarity in their assessment points to mul- tiple silences in family memory: about experiences so traumatic and crimes so atrocious that neither could be told. The Frankfurter Allgemeine, for its part, weighed in heavily for the film, pro- moting the event in the strongest terms as a chance for Germans today to achieve closure on long-standing emotional wounds. Deeming it “die Geschichte deutscher Alpträume,” Schirrmacher credits the miniseries with unlocking the silenced col- lective guilt and trauma upon which the Federal Republic was built and prospered. Its representation of the (grand)parents’ suffering proffers the answers the war generation could or would not give, he states. Accordingly, the film displays the Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 115 ability to authentically confess for a now almost extinct generation; Schirrmacher extols, “Er [der Film] will es jetzt wissen. Er will den Satz zu Ende sprechen.” Fer- vidly he calls for families to gather together, grandparents with children, children with parents, to watch the miniseries and see how it is “wenn Tote ins Leben zur- ückkehren.” Wolfgang Michal, in a more differentiated review, nonetheless echoes ruminations on a society damaged by silence and violence. Inspired by the film to ponder the emotional and political effects of a transgenerational traumatization into the present, Michal suggests that Germans today, as the secondary trauma- tized, are unable to feel: “Unsere Eltern verhielten sich nach außen vorbildlich, während sie im Innern emotional beschädigt waren. Ihre gepanzerten Gefühle haben sie an uns weitergegeben.” Schirrmacher’s and Michal’s colleague, Thomas Thiel, lauds the film for its emotive significance: the film offers a new way of thinking about the war, he proposes, because it strives neither to demand account- ability nor to exonerate but rather to facilitate understanding. Die Tageszeitung, in contrast, lambasts the miniseries for its call to “feel” family history. In a series of negative reviews weighing the film’s emotional intent against a more historically conscious interpretation of the war generation and its experiences, the portrayal is condemned because, as these reviews note, it fails to find a balance. Indeed, its emotional attachment to the non-Jewish prota- gonists, so the comments by reviewers, only iterate the current German memory culture that elides family involvement in the crimes of National Socialism (see, e.g. Feddersen, “Wieder” and “Neuen Helden”; Herbert); it does not associate the (grand)parents with the Nazis. Inverting Kadelbach’s words that affirm the perspective of Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter as a German film, Jan Feddersen de- nounces it as just that: “Wieder nur ein deutscher Film.” Feddersen believes the movie conforms to the norm of German representations of the Nazi era because it fails to paint parents or grandparents as anti-Semitic or nationalistic (“Wie- der”). Ulrich Herbert concurs in Die Tageszeitung that the Germans appear as they would like to have been. Even though, he maintains, the film shows scenes never seen before in a German movie (e.g. a swamp filled with the blood of freshly executed Jews or a farm family murdered by Wehrmacht soldiers), the film fails to show that the young soldiers committing such crimes had been duly socialized. The parents of today’s Germans were not simply young people who just wanted to embrace life but could not because of the war, as the film sug- gests, he reprimands; rather, they were a highly ideologized, politicized genera- tion that accepted the racist foundation of Nazi ideology and supported the war. This, Herbert believes, can still not be portrayed in German film. It would be misleading, however, to reduce the film’s reception simply to left or right leanings in the German media or to ascribe its reception solely to the political agenda of either political spectrum. A review in the liberally oriented newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, for example, lauds the miniseries for breaking bar- riers not because it presents new facts – the themes of suffering on the front, per- secution of the Jews, or torture in the army hospitals are well known, according to the author – but rather because it succeeds in narrating the war and the Hitler 116 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER era as an inescapable brutalization. Indeed, he states, “Eindringlicher kann der Nazi-Schrecken nicht wirken” (von Festenberg). Conversely, a reviewer in the conservatively oriented Welt am Sonntag questions the “Grenzen der Erinner- ung,” observing that public discourse on the film shows not only what can be told in Germany but also what continues to be silenced. This reviewer notes that while discussions on the miniseries do mention some of the negatives included in the film’s portrayal of a disillusioned youth (examples being the lack of resis- tance to National Socialist policies or a repression of the ostracism of the Jews), they avoid the fact “dass man Hitler gut gefunden hat” (Kamann). Thus, media re- views in Germany – while to some extent indicative of conventional conservative and liberal discourses on German victimhood – likewise reflect that these posi- tions are no longer as polarized in perspective as two decades ago. Just as an emo- tional connection to the experiences of non-Jewish German suffering is finding greater – and perhaps even more intense – expression in cultural texts, so, too, are the permissible boundaries of that emotion being tested or extended in their criti- cal reception on either side of the political spectrum. Media responses to Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter point to a society in flux on how it positions itself on “col- lective” or family narratives of non-Jewish German suffering against an historical awareness of the crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich. Seen through an international lens, the film’s inward focus on German trau- matization creates yet other memory debates. European players in the Second World War, notably Poland and Russia, who themselves cultivate and debate their own memory cultures on their own peoples’ experiences in the war, found the film’s subjective, emotional bias unacceptable – particularly considering the immense losses suffered by both countries during the German invasions. Poles, for many years wary of Germany’s new attention to German suffering through bombings, expulsion, and the war – reacted vehemently across the politi- cal spectrum to what they perceived as a revanchist interpretation of history. For its part, the conservative Polish weekly Uwazan Rze responded to Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter with an image on its 9 April 2013 cover of Angela Merkel as a con- centration camp prisoner and accused Germany of rewriting the facts: “Falsifica- tion of History: How the Germans Are Turning Themselves into Victims of the Second World War” (“Polish Weekly”). The film’s rendering of the Polish Home Army, the Armia Krajowa (AK), as brutally anti-Semitic proved most egregious. In one scene, for example, the leader of the underground resistance fighters, who now include Viktor, tells a Polish farmer who offers to aid them only if they har- bour no Jews that he and his band would not tolerate Jews: “Juden ertränken wir wie Katzen.” In another, the resistance fighters choose not to free the Jews in a stopped train on its way to the gas chambers – it is Viktor who defies the decision and lets them out. The Polish journalist Bartosz Wielinski, known for being politi- cally liberal and German friendly, opened a vehement public discussion in the Ga- zeta Wyborcza with the question: “Wer erklärt den Deutschen, dass die AK nicht die SS war?” (qtd. in Schuller). The journalist Adam Krzeminski, considered an expert on Germany, compared the movie with the anti-Polish movies of the Nazi Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 117 era. According to Krzeminski, psychotherapy was taking place “auf dem Rücken der Nachbarn,” and Germans were trying to share the guilt of the gas chambers with Poland (qtd. in Schuller). ZDF received protest letters from several corners, including the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Jerzy Marganski, and the head of the Polish broadcaster TVP, Juliusz Braun. Braun protested that the film’s representa- tion of the Poles had “nothing to do with historical reality” (qtd. in “Polish Weekly”), while Marganski reproached this understanding of history as detrimen- tal to the German-Polish dialogue (“ZDF weist [. . .] zurück”). Wielinski ex- pressed another sore point for the Poles: Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter begins in 1941, although the war began two years prior, with the invasion of Poland: “Es ist wie immer – für die Deutschen beginnt der Schrecken des Krieges erst mit dem Angriff auf die Sowjetunion. Aber nicht für uns. Polen war für die Deutschen nach 1939 ein Terror-Labor. Bombardierungen, Massenexekutionen von Zivilis- ten, Massaker an Juden oder Raub wurden hier das erste Mal in die Tat umgesetzt” (qtd. in “Polnische Journalist”). The Russians, like the Poles, took aim at the miniseries with accusations of historical revisionism. While the film undeniably makes advances in acknowled- ging crimes committed by the German army against the Soviet populations, its representation of events proved inadequate to ameliorate still-raw wounds. Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, charged Germany with downplaying Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in Unsere Müt- ter, unsere Väter, calling it “a further attempt to rewrite history” (qtd. in “Chill Settles”). The Russian Military Historical Society, chaired by the Russian minis- ter of culture Vladimir Medinsky, objected to the portrayal of the Red Army, ac- cusing the miniseries of accenting the inhumane behaviour of individual Soviet soldiers in order to cover up the heinous crimes of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front (Krökel; “Russen kritisieren”). In a scene where the Red Army takes over a German field infirmary on its march westward towards Berlin, for instance, Soviet soldiers shoot the wounded German soldiers point-blank and rape Charlotte, who is serving there as a nurse. Calling the scene a distortion of historical reality, the historical society alleged that the action replicates the Nazi demonization of Rus- sians masterminded by Goebbels. It noted that such propaganda served to cover up the Wehrmacht’s participation “an der kaltblütigen und methodischen Ver- nichtung der friedlichen Bevölkerung der Sowjetunion” (“Russen kritisieren”). For its part, ZDF defended its production and rebuffed attackers. In response to the Polish corner, ZDF pointed out that a number of historians had advised the project for historical accuracy. Further, they maintain, the film attempted to show the Second World War in its complexity and to create complicated, ambiv- alent fictional characters across the board – including also the Polish figures in the film (“ZDF weist [. . .] zurück”). As a conciliatory gesture, the network began a new documentary about Poland under German occupation during the Second World War that specifically addresses anti-Semitism in the AK (“ZDF plant Dokumentation”), which was released only several months after the minis- eries aired. 118 LAUREL COHEN-PFISTER
The film’s controversial reception in Poland and Russia only punctuates di- verging memories of trauma and suffering in the Second World War between groups and nations. The politics of emotion that guides the film’s representation of young Germans in the Third Reich loses in the international context its essen- tial reference to the collective or family memories of Germans as represented in the film. Indeed, it contradicts the memory narratives inscribed in the communi- cative memory of these countries. Not only does the representation of trauma and victimhood lose its affective power; it also sacrifices all claim to historical accuracy. From the Polish and Russian perspective, the film does little to get inside the psyche or emotions of their “mothers and fathers”; Russian soldiers and Polish partisans – interpreted through the memory frameworks of their home countries – are used solely to increase a German viewing audience’s empathetic engagement with the film’s German protagonists. Accusations of historical revisionism bring to the fore the political dimen- sions of current cultural representations of German victimhood. Where Polish, Russian, and negative German reviews of the miniseries converge in their argu- ments is in their demand for a clearer representation of German responsibility for the horrors of the war. Interestingly, however, whereas Polish and Russian cri- tiques phrase the problem collectively, German critics address it more individu- ally, calling attention to the personal guilt of the (grand)parents still missing in family narratives of the Third Reich. Diverging opinions in the German media reflect the historical knowledge of guilt and responsibility derived from years of working through the German past in public forums. They simultaneously reveal, however, the problems that arise when this history is emotionally interpreted through the lens of an implicated generation.
Conclusion As German representations of the Second World War play out in the media, tele- vision becomes, as Cooke observes, “a part of Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (540). Historical docudramas like Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter become signifi- cant players “in cultural memory and the popular negotiation of the past” (An- derson 20). Precisely because they blur the lines between fact and fiction, they highlight continuing tensions between historical consciousness and emotional engagement on how the German past can and should be remembered: deliber- ately emotional interpretations of the past that reference personal or family memory are still contested against a historical awareness of German guilt and responsibility. However, the politics of emotion that underscores the representa- tion of German history in Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter reflects the trend towards including family memories of traumatization in the official narrative of the war, just as it contributes to granting this narrative greater visibility in cultural mem- ory. It is important to note that the emotional politics of highly subjective repre- sentations of “German” trauma obviously resonate with large viewing audiences, who see in them their own family narratives of victimhood publicly iterated and confirmed. As Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz point out, media events in Western Claiming the Second World War and Its Lost Generation 119 societies are not simply political machinations: “Public approval is required for an event to succeed.” Journalists, too, they note, “need convincing before sus- pending professional disbelief” (19). Looking at the production, promotion, and reception of Unsere Mütter, un- sere Väter thus exemplifies the questions that accompany proclamations of “a German film” with “a German perspective.” The debates the miniseries raises address differences in transnational and national memory narratives and the ways in which emotional and cognitive knowledge of the German past can be re- conciled in collective memory. Though the miniseries purports to portray authen- tically the war generation’s experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War – including its participation in morally reprehensible acts – its intent to evoke empathy, if not sympathy, with this generation ultimately impedes an indictment of their actions. Indeed, the representational intent is to enable under- standing them, outside categories of right or wrong. This politically controversial move is both lauded and criticized in the German press and understandably con- demned in Poland and Russia, countries with differing memory narratives on the Second World War. A look at the memory politics behind Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter indicates ultimately that its intended representation of a collective German memory is nei- ther collective nor memory; rather, it is a consciously constructed subjective rep- resentation of the mindset and feelings of the war generation, whose true thoughts and feelings can only be surmised. The parents it claims collectively for the nation cannot in actuality represent the diversity of family narratives in the Federal Republic. So seen, it reifies a “romantically national” (e.g. von Moltke, “Sympathy” 18) conception of Germanness and nation that competes with trans- national and global influences on the national narrative in Germany today. Media debates for and against the film, themselves highly charged, duly reflect the lack of consensus on the historical accuracy and the political admissibility of such a representation. As the lived memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust dies out with the generation that experienced them, the cultural representations of this history assume greater importance for younger generations. The success of Un- sere Mütter, unsere Väter as a television event intimates that its story indeed appeals to millions in the German viewing public. The controversies that accom- pany it spotlight, however, the conflict between fact and emotion that defines the political boundaries of memory on German experiences of the Third Reich and the Second World War.
Works Cited
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Anderson, Steve. “History and Popular Memory.” Television Histories: Shaping Collec- tive Memory in the Media Age. Ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins. Lexing- ton: Kentucky UP, 2001. 19–36. “Chill Settles over German-Russian Relations.” Spiegel Online 15 Apr. 2013. 20 June 2013
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