In den USA läuft der letztjährige ZDF-Mehrteiler „Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter“ als fünfstündiges Gesamtwerk unter dem Titel „Generation War“ in den Arthouse-Kinos. Fünf Stunden „Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter“ am Stück – kein Wunder, dass einem da mal der Hut hochgeht…

Wir haben ja bereits hiesige Schmähkritiken zu dem Thema dokumentiert, doch die Außenperspektive der New York Times auf das Zweitweltkriegsepos ist zusätzlich von Interesse – und spart nicht mit Kritik:


„Coming after the silence of the ’50s and early ’60s and the angry reckonings of the ’70s and ’80s, “Generation War,” emotionally charged but not exactly anguished, represents an attempt to normalize German history. Its lesson is that ordinary Germans — “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” in the original title — were not so different from anyone else, and deserve the empathy and understanding of their grandchildren.
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This may, in the abstract, seem fair enough, but the film slips into a strange, queasy zone between naturalism and nostalgia. In effect, it is a plea on behalf of Germans born in the early 1920s for inclusion in a global Greatest Generation, an exercise in selective memory based on the assumption that it’s time to let bygones be bygones. (…)

As television drama, “Generation War” is unquestionably effective. As dramatized history, it is pretty questionable.

This has less to do with factual accuracy than with the way facts are shaped, juxtaposed and given emotional weight. The evil of the Nazis is hardly denied, but it is mainly localized within a few cartoonishly sadistic SS and Gestapo commanders, who are nearly as cruel to regular German soldiers as they are to Jews and Russians. There is also an element of moral relativism in the way the film portrays the Polish resistance, whose members hate Jews as much as the Germans, but with worse manners, and the bestial, rampaging members of the Red Army, who have no manners at all. (…)

the suggestion that the Nazis were not the only bad guys in Eastern Europe in the early 1940s is undermined by the film’s disinclination to show the very worst of what the Nazis did. We see massacres of Jews by local militias in Ukraine under the supervision of the SS, but “Generation War,” for all its geographical range and military detail, steers clear of the death camps.

This omission has the effect of at least partly restoring the innocence of the characters and of perpetuating the notion that ordinary Germans were duped by the Nazis and ignorant of the extent of their crimes — that they were as much Hitler’s victims as his accomplices and did not know what he was doing. They also suffered, after all, but there is something troubling about how the filmmakers apportion this suffering.

The artist, the intellectual and the Jew are all punished, for wantonness, weakness and naïveté, and pushed into extreme states of moral compromise. The chaste, self-sacrificing Aryans, the lieutenant and the nurse, though they are not without guilt, are the heroes of the story, just as they would have been in a German film made in 1943. The moral this time around is that they have, at long last, earned the world’s forgiveness.“


(US-Filmkritiker A.O. Scott in der New York Times)


Mehr Schmähkritik:
* Nr 531: Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter


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