International Press Review

“…a turning point in German television.” Der Spiegel ‘’…rarely has such a programme triggered as much debate and interest”

“…a turning point in German television.”

‘‘epochal“

“an epoch-making event, not only in TV history”

“tough, uncompromising – a grandiose anti-war film”

“uncompromising, wonderfully acted, an absolute must-see!” “An epoch-making three-parter… the last chance to relate the history of the war across the generations”

‘truthful, gripping, compassionate – a great television event’

‘the most important TV movie of the year’

„The cruelly precise World War II drama “Generation War” finally breaks a silence between generations. It marks a turning point in German television.”

“Generation War” relates the historical connections as a gripping and modern feature film. The opinion of BILD: absolute worth watching.”

“The story of the totally normal, youthful representative of our past touches a truth in our souls. One should talk about this – especially with the members of the war generation. As long as this is still possible.”

“Grandiose war epic!” By Jeevan Vasagar , 22 Mar 2013 Reviewers have praised the drama for breaking new ground by German TV Drama confronts a nation‘s wartime guilt showing how the Nazi system reached into every corner of life. Christian Buss, a culture editor for the magazine Spiegel wrote in a review of the drama that while the question of Germans' collective A television drama exploring the guilt of ordinary Germans during guilt had been resolved, the role of individuals remained unclear. the Second World War has become a ratings sensation in , "Who has had the conversation with their own parents and reaching more than seven million viewers. grandparents about the moral failings of their elders?" he wrote. "The Our Mothers, Our Fathers follows the lives of five young men and history of the Third Reich has been examined down to the level of women – two brothers who become soldiers, a singer, a Hitler's dog while our own family history is a deep dark crater." nurse and their Jewish friend. The final episode was watched by 7.6 million people. The series draws on the experiences of the film-makers' parents The drama begins on the eve of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and shows how the young people are rapidly corrupted by the Third Reich. One of the soldiers executes a Russian prisoner, while the nurse betrays a Jewish patient to the SS. The Jewish man is shown escaping the Nazis to find shelter with Polish partisans. The three-part series has been hailed by critics as a "turning point" in German television for examining the crimes of the Third Reich at an individual level. The screenplay of Our Mothers, Our Fathers draws on the experiences of the film-makers' parents – the screenwriter Stefan Kolditz's father was a 19-year-old soldier on the eastern front, while a scene in which a Jewish child is shot was based on an event witnessed by the producer Nico Hofmann's father. The drama also explores the seductive aspect of Nazism. Mr Hofmann told the newspaper Bild: "My mother took many years to understand that was not a father figure, not a substitute for religion, not a missionary." 3/21/2013 by Scott Roxborough

MIPTV 2013: German Series Sparks National Debate About War German critics have been nearly universal in their praise for the History series, with Der Spiegel calling it a “turning point in German television” and a review in national newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung “Generation War,” billed as a German “Band of Brothers,” said Generation War provides “the first and last chance .. to ask follows the lives of five friends from 1939-1945. grandparents about their true biographies, their immoral COLOGNE, Germany – A billed as a German Band of compromises ... the missed chances to act – everything which, in Brothers has become a ratings hit here and sparked a nationwide masses, leads to catastrophe”. discussion about the role of ordinary Germans during WWII. Historic dramas set during WWII are nothing new for German TV but The six-hour series Generation War depicts the lives of five German in the past they have been more costume melodramas that shied friends from 1939-1945. Most of the series is set among the German away both from the raw violence of the period and uncomfortable Wehrmacht - the regular German armed forces, not the Nazi- historic truths. In scenes that are certain to make Generation War as controlled Waffen SS - and occurs on the Eastern Front, the site of controversial East of Berlin as it is in Germany, some of the Polish the most brutal acts of violence by the German army in World War II. partisans fighting the invading Nazis are depicted as Anti-Semites. That violence is at the core of Generation War , something that sets “We tried to filter out all the conventions that are usually used in the series apart from previous German TV shows set during WWII. telling stories from the war on German TV, such as using a love Also central to the series is the idea of personal complicity and story to provide the dramatic arc,” said Nico Hoffmann of Berlin- burden of guilt on ordinary Germans for the Nazi atrocities. based teamWorx, speaking to THR at television industry conference In addition to drawing record ratings for public broadcaster ZDF over MIPCOM last fall, where the producers unveiled the first footage of three nights – 7.6 million viewers, a 24 percent share of the German the series. “Instead we wanted to get as close to the documented audience, saw the series finale Wednesday night - Generation War facts as we could." Hoffman cites Band of Brothers as an inspiration has begun a heated discussion in the media here over history and for the style of Generation War although the characters in the personal responsibility. The debate is arguably on a scale last seen German series are fictional. following the release of Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). TeamWorx produced Generation War for ZDF and Austrian public “Were German Soldiers Really So Barbaric?” was one front page broadcaster ORF in association with Jan Mojto's Beta Film. Beta is headline in leading German tabloid Bild , which, like many selling the series to international buyers at MIP TV in Cannes next newspapers and websites here, called on wartime veterans and month. family members to share their personal memories of the time. Yes, they were, was Bild 's conclusion. Tony Paterson Saturday 23 March 2013

Postcard from… Germany “The war” is mentioned almost daily in the German media at the moment. The reason is a new €15m TV drama, Our Mothers, Our Fathers, which gives a shockingly realistic account of five 20- something Germans before, during and at the end of the conflict in 1945. The series was broadcast at prime time for three nights this week. It attracted more than seven million viewers and glowing critical acclaim. The ordeals suffered by the protagonists are dreadful: two brothers enlist in the German army. Wide-eyed they are dispatched to the eastern front where they are confronted with the reality of SS men who shoot Jewish children at point-blank range and receive orders to assassinate prisoners on capture. One returns traumatised for life. The other commits suicide. Their well-meaning girl friend serves as a front-line nurse and ends up being raped by soldiers. German TV viewers have been fed on countless documentaries about the Second World War. But Edgar Reitz’s famous 1980s Heimat drama series was the first to give post-war generation German and British TV audiences a real inkling of what the war must have felt like for many Germans. Our Mothers, Our Fathers could do the same. Saturday March 30, 2013

To outsiders’ eyes, German television can be a dispiriting wasteland Over three nights, the miniseries shows the complexity of the of witless comedy and bizarre folk-music extravaganzas. But there is characters and their situation without absolving them of the guilt for, one genre that Germany still does very well: the miniseries. or consequences of, their wartime actions. “This is a generation that killed, many times,” says Hoffman. A friend Creating event television may seem an anachronistic endeavour in of his father’s was the source of one scene in the film, in which a the era of YouTube and Netflix Yet last week, as Cypriot protestors soldier sent to burn down a shack encounters an elderly Russian wielded posters of Angela Merkel with a Hitler moustache, millions of couple, who offer him tea. “My father’s friend didn’t just burn down Germans sat down once more to confront the real shadows of the the house but the entire village,” he says. “In the end, there were only 80- year-old Russian women left, clutching their teapots.” past. Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter ( Our Mothers, Our Fathers ) was The producer took another calculated risk by framing the miniseries billed as epochal television, and over three nights up to eight million as a final chance for viewers to engage with the last war generation people – a quarter of the available audience – watched the story of – not of victims but of perpetrators. Given the level of Third Reich five twentysomething friends dragged into the second World War. dross dished out almost daily in the German media, it was far from certain that this strategy would work. Weak viewership figures could They part company in 1941, promising to meet up again in Berlin at have sent a disastrous signal that, seven decades on, Germans are Christmas, but the war has other plans for them. Two brothers are irretrievably apathetic to their terrible past. enlisted into the Wehrmacht, a young woman joins the Red Cross, Thankfully, things turned out differently, and Hoffman demonstrated and a Jewish friend attempts to flee , aided by an that the Third Reich doesn’t have to be turned into a Tarantino freak opportunistic girlfriend who dreams of being the next Marlene show to engage a young audience. Dietrich. After its success in Germany, the producers are now in negotiations to sell the miniseries worldwide at next month’s television festival in The tale, as told through these five pairs of eyes, force a Hitler-jaded Cannes. audience to lay aside their knowledge of what lies ahead. In five “We did the Hitler film Downfall , but the debate this miniseries has extraordinary performances, five young German actors fill their sparked in Germany is remarkable; we’ve never seen anything like archetypal characters with the certainty of youth, and allow it to drain it,” says Dorothee Stoewahse of Betafilm the distributor. “It’s one thing to sell to , but we’re in advanced talks with the US and away slowly with each successive month of war. the UK – that’s new.” The €15 million production, a seven- year labour of love for its Television doesn’t get any stronger than Unsere Mütter, Unsere producer, Nico Hofmann, avoids black and white tones, painting Väter , and anyone who watches will understand a little better why characters in shades of grey to match their moral limbo, trapped the shadow of German history is more complex than a marker moustache on a political poster. between the moral high ground of later generations and the moral low ground prepared by parents who voted for Hitler and disaster. Mar 27th 2013, 4:07 from print edition

A new television drama about wartime Germany stirs up controversy Fighting a losing war

GERMAN television viewers are used to frequent programmes It seems the actual atrocities were committed by others, not those exploring the Nazi era and the second world war. But rarely has such who are prepared to speak today. Ninety-year-olds now talk of a programme triggered as much debate and interest as the “seeing villages burned” or of how they escaped firing-squad duty. screening in mid-March of a three-part drama, “ Unsere Mütter, What comes across strongly from these accounts is that after 1943 unsere Väter ” (Our Mothers, Our Fathers), which tracks the lives of most intelligent Germans accepted that the war was lost. If they five young German friends from 1941 to 1945. fought on it was out of desperation or camaraderie. Dieter The fictional drama, based on scrupulous research, had on average Wellershoff, a writer, interviewed on a popular talk show, said he 7.6m viewers per night. Suddenly the few survivors of Germany’s volunteered for the Hermann Göring tank regiment in 1943 aged 18, wartime generation are being sought out as never before by talk after the German defeats in Stalingrad and north Africa, knowing that shows and newspapers. Grandfathers and grandmothers, who for he was joining a losing war. years kept silent, or were never asked, are facing questions about All five characters in Mr Hofmann’s film reach that conclusion early how it could happen, what it was like and whether they saw on. They are swept along like corks in an ocean. The atrocities two atrocities. Some more painful questions about who committed what of them commit as soldiers—one executes a Soviet commissar, the atrocity are resurfacing, too. other a Jewish girl—seem to come from their circumstances: obey or In this section die. The real war criminals are the others who exult in killing or Nearly 70 years after the end of the Third Reich, Germans feel intellectualise it. That has prompted some critics to suggest that compelled to keep their country’s Nazi history alive. “It’s not about putting five sympathetic young protagonists into a harrowing story guilt any more, but it is about collective responsibility,” says Arnd just offers the war generation a fresh bunch of excuses. It’s never Bauerkämper, professor of history and cultural studies at the Free over. University in Berlin. The suspicion, however irrational, says Der Spiegel , a weekly, is that the German people are a special case, a historical outlier, who are unsure of themselves and must time and again seek reassurance. “It’s never over,” read a headline for an interview with Nico Hofmann, producer of the series, and a bunch of young Germans in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , a daily. Films such as “Schindler’s List”, “Holocaust”, an American television series, and the German-made “Downfall”, which tracks Hitler’s final days, all caused passing sensations in Germany. Yet they did not prompt the same intergenerational questioning. “ Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” has reminded the public that this is their last chance to talk to survivors. MIPTV: Music Box Picks up 'Generation War' for U.S. 4/8/2013 by Scott Roxborough

The series follows a group of childhood friends as the go though the horrors of WWII. The six-hour WWII drama is billed as a German "Band of Brothers." CANNES - Theatrical distributor Music Box Films has picked up U.S. rights to Generation War , an acclaimed German-language TV series billed as a German equivalent to HBO's Band of Brothers, from sales group Beta Film. Music Box is planning a platform theatrical bow for the six-hour Generation War in selected U.S. cities, to be followed by a roll out on VOD, home video and TV. Music Box has experience with handling international series, having scored successes with the U.S. bow of the Swedish crime trilogy, released as three feature films and a six-part TV series as well as the original Swedish version of the Henning Mankell procedural Wallander . Generation War , which aired as a three-part miniseries in Germany, was a ratings hit for public broadcaster ZDF; drawing a peak of some 8.5 million viewers. Critics have hailed the series and its brutal depiction of the war on Germany's East Front as a turning point for local-language drama. The series has also provoked a heated debate, both in Germany and in neighboring Poland. Directed by , Generation War features a cast of German cinema stars including Tom Shilling (Oh Boy ), Sylvester Groth (Inglourious Basterds ) and Katharina Schuttler (Carlos ). In addition to the U.S. deal, Beta has sold rights to Generation War to Arrow Film in the U.K., to EOne/Hopscotch for Australia and to Sweden's SVT, marking the first time in years the Swedish public channel will air a German TV series. U.S. Distrib Music Box Nabs ‘Generation War,’ ‘Tower’ Chicago-based company aims to give German TV series a theatrical run Stateside Elsa Keslassy Apr 7, 2013

CANNES — Underscoring growing synergies between film and TV drama, Chicago-based distrib Music Box has acquired all U.S. rights to “Generation War” (pictured above) and “The Tower” (Die Turm), two German historical mini-series co-produced and repped by Jan Mojto’s Beta Film, on the eve of MipTV. WWII-set “Generation War” is a six-part series turning on six German teens whose friendship is put to test during the conflict. “Generation War,” lead-produced by Nico Hofmann’s TeamWorx, premiered on Teutonic pubcaster ZDF to top ratings and warm reviews, sparking a public debate about the period. “The Tower” is a two-parter based on Uwe Tellkamp’s novel about life in East Germany in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. “European television is upping its game and both ‘Generation War’ and ‘The Tower’ are good examples of it,” said Ed Arentz, Music Box’ managing director. Arentz added “Generation War” will probably play in two-hour blocks and will be released theatrically in major markets. “ ‘Generation War’ has a theatrical quality and we want it to be treated that way and reviewed seriously.” Music Box will also sell “The Tower” and “Generation War” in secondary markets — TV, VOD and DVD. “Anything is possible. ‘Generation War’ might end up on Netflix before we even consider television. Netflix streaming is a wonderful place for series programming to be discovered — it has a viewership that’s intrigued by series,” Arentz said. It’s the not the first time Music Box has picked up a TV title for the bigscreen. Last year, it nabbed Henning Mankell’s “Wallander,” a Swedish crime drama comprising 13 90-minute episodes. Pubcasters BBC and DR plus production company Beta tubthump mini-series Leo Barraclough Apr 9, 2013

CANNES – For some broadcasters, the war is not over — at least as Her project, “1864,” focuses on the war between Denmark and a subject for TV drama. Germany in that year, resulting in Denmark’s loss of a chunk of its territory, Schleswig-Holstein. It centers on two teenage brothers going At the MipTV mart here today, three companies tubthumped war- to war. themed drama series, with each offering a story about how war “It is a coming-of-age story and it is about how going to war affects destroys young lives. your life,” said Bernth, who produced “The Killing” and “The Bridge,” The BBC’s head of drama, Ben Stephenson, revealed that he had both of which have been remade for the U.S. market. “It is a story of just greenlit five-part skein “The Great War,” about two 18-year-olds, loss of innocence, and that is something that you can all relate to, and one German, one British, whose lives are shattered by WWI. if it is told in a good way it travels, I’m sure.” “Each episode will tell one year of the war from the point of view of Elsewhere at the confab, Beta Film CEO Jan Mojto highlighted the these two soldiers, who never meet until the final episode, when they success of the company’s WWII miniseries “Generation War,” which are in an ultimate confrontation,” Stephenson said. has been sold to U.S. distributor Music Box, as well as buyers in the “A piece like that shows how television is becoming so epic in its U.K., Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands. scale, but always coming back to what ultimately the audience is The drama, about a group of young friends, scored record ratings on driven by, which is getting inside characters’ heads,” Stephenson German pubcaster ZDF with 8.5 million viewers — a 24% market said. share — and triggered a debate in Germany about personal guilt for Producing the series will be Red Planet Pictures, whose topper Tony war crimes. German magazine Der Spiegel called the series a Jordan made his reputation with U.K. sudser “Eastenders.” “turning point in German television,” and said it was “a new milestone of German remembrance culture beyond the generations.” It will air throughout Armistice Week next year to mark the 100th Earlier in the day, a case study was devoted to the BBC thriller “Spies anniversary of the start of the war. of Warsaw,” which focuses on the activities of French and German During a MipTV panel discussion with Stephenson about the secrets spies in the years leading up to WWII. David Tennant stars in the of producing great drama, Piv Bernth, head of drama at Danish skein, which writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais adapted from pubcaster DR, spoke about a series she is producing. Alan Furst’s novel. German War Guilt: The Miniseries The country's breakout With a sprawling narrative structure similar to American series like television series confronts WWII atrocities head on "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific," the miniseries follows a group of five Berliners over the final four years of the war on the Eastern front. It begins in 1941, in a Berlin corner bar, at a celebration of May 7, 2013 BY THOMAS ROGERS Friedhelm and Wilhelm's deployment. There, the two 'helms meet up One hour into "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" ("Unsere Mütter, unsere with their three close childhood friends: Väter"), the hit new German miniseries about World War II, a group Greta (an aspiring singer) Greta's boyfriend Jakob (the Jewish son of of German soldiers is trapped in front of a Russian minefield. Among a tailor), and Charlotte (a newly trained nurse). The five friends, all them are two of the series' protagonists, Friedhelm and Wilhelm, charming and good-looking, celebrate much like any early-twenties brothers from Berlin with strong jaws and very precise haircuts. group of friends would—by drinking beer, singing, and trying on each Friedhelm is a bookish, sympathetic Berliner who has thus far been others' hats. reluctant to kill anyone while his heroic older brother, Wilhelm, is the By the end of the miniseries, only Jakob emerges morally unscathed. group's admired leader. But now they face a problem: How to get While he joins a group of Polish resistance fighters, Greta begins an themselves to the Russian line? affair with a powerful SS lieutenant, at first to save Jakob, but then to Unexpectedly, Friedhelm has a suggestion: force some Russian advance her singing career. Meanwhile, Charlotte rats out a Jewish farmers, whom they've recently detained, to walk in front of them. A nurse working in her hospital, who is then taken away and, few minutes later, the first Russian hits a mine, setting off an presumably, killed. And Friedhelm and Wilhelm both undergo radical explosion of mud and blood. Friedhelm stares on, unmoved. transformations over the course of their deployment: After executing The scene stands out for a couple reasons—not just for its high a communist leader, Wilhelm grapples with the morality of his production values (a rarity in Germany, whose TV offerings tend to orders, while Friedhelm (played by current German cinema It-boy be low-budget) but for its frank depiction of wartime atrocity. The Tom Schilling) goes from pacifist to cold-blooded murderer. At the minefield scene is, in fact, just one of many horrific acts the two end of the war, Friedhelm is executing Polish children and hanging brothers perpetrate over the course of the miniseries, a sweeping Polish villagers in town squares. television event that has galvanized a new discussion about Nico Hoffmann, the producer behind the series, has said that he was Germany's war guilt. One of the most ambitious projects in German inspired to create the series by his interactions with his own father, television history, "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" was ten years in the who had long been reluctant to discuss the things he had seen and making and cost an extraordinary (by German standards) 14 million done during the war. "This is our very last chance to speak openly Euros to produce. about this," he told the German magazine Focus , referring to the It may still find an even bigger audience in the United States, where dwindling numbers of surviving WWII veterans. cross-cultural curiosity about television hasn’t typically extended For most of the postwar era, the popular narrative about the war in beyond Scandinavia and the UK. A few weeks ago, however, the Germany claimed that the SS had perpetrated the most egregious reputable American art house distributor Music Box Films (which has crimes of the Nazi regime and the Wehrmacht only participated in distributed, among many other films, the Swedish "Girl with a Dragon "exceptional" cases. But in the last two decades, historians have Tattoo" trilogy, in the United States) announced that it had acquired argued for a far greater Wehrmacht involvement in the killing of the American distribution rights for the 4.5-hour series, which will be Jews, Polish partisans, prisoners of war and many others, especially shown in American movie theaters under the name "Generation in the former Soviet Union. The miniseries is the country’s most War." It’s the first show in German history to be given this kind of high-profile examination of this broader concept of culpability. theatrical distribution in the United States. - Accordingly, each of the miniseries' episodes was followed by a In 1984, "Heimat," a 32-episode series recounting German history documentary program in which real German veterans discussed from 1919 to 2000, was a widespread critical success. In 2006, the their experiences during the war, and viewers were referred to a web same company behind "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" produced page where they could share their own memories or answer "Dresden," a romance between a British pilot and a German nurse questions like "What would you have done?" set against the backdrop of the Dresden bombings; 2007's "March of It's a formula with some precedents: Over the last several decades, Millions" revolved around the evacuation of East Prussia after WWII; the TV miniseries has become a curiously powerful medium for in 2011, "Go West" told the story of three friends trying to escape spurring cultural discussions about history and guilt. In 1977, ABC's East Germany. There have also been TV films about Rommel and "Roots," a nine-part miniseries that followed a black family from the Stauffenberg, and each of those, to varying degrees, launched Gambia to American plantations and into the 20th century, launched media debates about history, atrocity and guilt. a new discussion about slavery and African-American history in the To be truly successful, historical miniseries require a delicate U.S. Two years later, NBC's "Holocaust" starring Meryl Streep and balancing act between historical accuracy, simplicity, and James Woods helped to create widespread public interest in the melodrama. (Elie Wiesel notoriously accused "Holocaust" of being crimes of the Nazi era. In the decades since, American TV has "inaccurate and offensive.") Given Germany's horrific history, that produced sprawling historical miniseries about Christopher can make for an especially fine line to toe. After "Our Mothers, Our Columbus ("Christopher Columbus"), The Civil War, ("North and Fathers" aired on German TV, Polish TV executives issued an angry South"), World War II ("Band of Brothers," "The Pacific," "WWII"), the complaint to the ZDF, the German public network on which the Kennedys ("Kennedy," "The Kennedys"), the Founders ("John miniseries aired, about its portrayal of Polish partisan fighters as Adams"), the Iraq War ("Generation Kill") and the Nuremberg Trials anti-Semites, and some historians accused it of downplaying the ("Nuremberg"). It's easy to see what draws networks to this kind of pervasive Nazi ideology of young people at the time. And truth be programming: They offer easy name recognition for viewers and are told, the miniseries' penchant for melodrama can be queasy-making pretty much guaranteed to get media coverage. They also allow at times. One of its primary subplots involves an unspoken love audiences to attach themselves to the most momentous aspects of between Charlotte and Wilfried, but given Wilfried's occasional their own history: France, for example, filmed its own "Napoleon" tendency to shoot innocent Russians, it seems petty to worry about miniseries, the UK "Elizabeth I," Australia "Anzacs," Canada "The the future of his love life. Arrow," among many others. Even so, it has been, by most standards, a remarkable success. And Germany, with its incredibly fraught relationship with its own Some 7.6 million viewers watched its final episode, which amounts past, has in recent years proven to be a remarkably fertile ground for to nearly one tenth of the German population, and most major the historical miniseries—although they have tended to be darker German newspapers published one (or many) columns about the than, say, "The Kennedys." real-life history it portrays. German historian Norbert Frei argued that the miniseries "laid bare … involvement of the Wehrmacht in the murder of the Jews, the killing of hostages in the Partisan War, the execution of commanders in the Russian army" and called it "important and new." In the Berliner Morgenpost , Martin Luecke, a historian at the Freie Universitaet, wrote that the miniseries shows "that the crimes of the Wehrmacht are no longer a taboo—that they are a well-integrated theme in German history.” Bild , the highest-circulation newspaper in Europe, ran a feature entitled "Were German soldiers really that cruel?" with the sub-headline: "For each German soldier, ten civilians were killed." When the miniseries arrives in American theaters, it's likely to get a much more subdued reaction, but the fact that Americans will be seeing it at all is a reason for the German television industry to rejoice. The quality of German TV is a popular subject of derision among Germans—the country's most popular programs include "Wetten Dass," a 3-to-4-hour long variety show featuring a strange assortment of uncomfortable-looking American stars, like Justin Timberlake, watching novelty competitions in which, for example, people try to guess how much water is left in a bottle by listening to plunking sounds. (After one lengthy recent appearance on the program, an unhappy Tom Hanks told a German radio program that "In the United States, if you are on a TV show that goes on for four hours, everybody responsible for that show is fired the next day.") The international sale of "Our Mothers, Our Fathers," producers likely hope, offers an incentive for more ambitious programming. But American audiences will probably be more interested in the glimpse it offers into Germany's evolving attitudes towards its own history. As the number of German veterans continues to dwindle, feelings about the crimes of the Nazi era among younger generations are likely to grow less visceral, but perhaps, hopefully, more objective. As Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, put it, the miniseries may be a sign that young Germans "are more willing to learn and ask questions in an open-minded way." If "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" is successful in the U.S., young Americans may soon have a new perspective on German history too. Press Release

Phenomenal viewer hit “Generation War” triggers unprecedented media debate in Germany

Munich, 21 March 2013. The highly acclaimed event production Generation War , praised as a “turning point in German television” (Der Spiegel ), has scored record ratings in Germany, triggering an unprecedented media and public debate about the personal involvement and guilt of everyone’s parents and grandparents. The exceptional “Band of Brothers”-style six-hour miniseries reached up to 7.6 million viewers (market share 24.3 %) on public broadcaster ZDF, winning the prime time against Private Practice , Grey’s Anatomy and CSI NY as well as beating high-class feature films such as Spiderman 3 and PS I love you . Generation War was also sensationally well received among the younger audience (14-49 For further information: years), reaching up to 17.5 % market share, tripling ZDF’s average Beta Film Press and leaving all other public and private channels far behind. Dorothee Stoewahse Tel: + 49 89 67 34 69 15 Generation War , the story about five friends besieged by twisted [email protected], www.betafilm.com ideologies and raw violence, was heavily covered in German media. 68 years after the end of the war, people suddenly started discussing the role of their loved ones who lost their youth and innocence Pictures available under: between 1939 and 1945. Germany’s largest tabloid BILD ran several ftp.betafilm.com WWII-stories on its front page, asking veterans for wartime Login: ftppress01 memories. Süddeutsche Zeitung, praising Generation War as “epochal”, stated: “It is the first and last chance to look for the ‘devil Passwort: 8uV7xG3tB in the details,’ to ask grandparents about their true biographies, their File: MipTV 2013 immoral compromises, their little ill-advised arrangements, the wages of living a lie, the missed chances to act – everything which, in masses, leads to catastrophe.”

Generation War is produced by teamWorx for ZDF and ORF in association with Beta Film. The program will be presented to international buyers at the trade fare MipTV in April in Cannes.