This logic will be jeopardized more than once by dramatization methods, as mentioned earlier.ĥOnce one identifies the seduction exerted by Nazi ideology, faint yet real nevertheless, we can explain and understand how it functions, thanks to the psychological hints present throughout the series.Ħ An essential symbol of Generation War lies in the initial photograph, the one of the five friends taken while they were together in Berlin before they parted ways, and which they each hold on to a copy. It corresponds to a logic of standardization, a logic which is supposed to make us understand that the panel of characters before us can, to a lesser or greater scale, represent all of German society, in an inductive scientific perspective. This once again shows the authors’ desire to present a picture with nuances. Each character is not receptive to this in the same way. The malevolent idea, ceaselessly repeated and having disguised itself in its finest apparel, finally manages to gain the minds of the most idealist and innocent youth to germinate the darkest of flowers, as a Trojan horse having traversed without trouble the outer wall and stands ready to unleash its vile flood of criminal and destructive thoughts. It does show however the unfaltering power of seduction Nazi doctrine held over them, a seduction which discreetly yet deeply contaminated the youth, to the point of helping to understand how such atrocities were committed.
WILHELM UNSERE MÜTTER UNSERE VÄTER SERIES
The series is far from giving way to an easy demagoguery which would consist in presenting all Germans as awful fanatics. We are immediately plunged into an ideologized Germany, at the dawn of massive deportations which destroyed the Jewish community. Hitler’s access to power as well as his progressive grip on the entire society is therefore not included. We shall now seek to describe the originality of Generation War which is based on a very interesting attempt to think about the Nazi phenomenon.ĤThe series begins in 1941. The pure and unapologetic fiction takes precedence over the desire of reconstitution.ģThese two approaches, a priori contradictory, are in fact completely dependent on each other. The series delves into individual stories, completely unique and even at times exceptional, which occasionally detracts from their universal scope. Though each protagonist presents a different facet of what the values and aspirations of an average German could have been, they each also assert a bold individuality.
However this phenomenon, which falls under a certain standardization, also presents its opposite, in other words an aim toward dramatization.
The group is comprised of Viktor, a Jew whose father was considered the most famous tailor of the city before the events of the Night of Broken Glass Greta, a diva who is more preoccupied with her own personal glory than that of her country (which, from the start, presages the tragic fate that awaits her) Charlotte, a somewhat naive young woman who sees in the model of the German woman upheld by the Nazis (devoted, loyal, we encounter here the sacrificial rhetoric of totalitarianism) an ideal to attain Wilheim and Fridelm, two brothers, one is already a non-commissioned officer, the other does not yet know the ropes of the horrors at the front and is rather reluctant to the ambient exaltation.ĢThe series hopes to present a picture of German society through these five protagonists, to portray characters who are various expressions of the same idea, the concept of German citizens under the Third Reich (without excluding Jews yet). 1 The series Generation War portrays five friends living at the heart of Nazi Germany, in Berlin during the 1940s.