Next-Generation WWII Atonement

A great piece, at Der Spiegel, "'Our Mothers, Our Fathers': ZDF TV Miniseries Reopens Wounds of German WWII Past":

A miniseries that aired in Germany this month has enthralled viewers with its emotional portrayal of the role that average people played in WWII. Stripped of moral pretension, it also establishes a new, multigenerational milestone in the country's culture of remembrance.

At the end, the famous zero hour, when the survivors meet again in the now-abandoned Berlin pub they used to frequent, tight-lipped, with empty faces and a dull look in their eyes, everything comes down to a single sentence. None of them can say it out loud. It would sound far too weighty in light of the historic nothingness they face in their reunion.

Instead, a voice-over delivers what is, in a sense, the moral of the story following the demise of Nazi Germany in May 1945, establishing both an end and a beginning: "Soon there will only be Germans, and not a single Nazi."

At this point, the SS major has burned his brown uniform and already sits in a neatly pressed suit at a desk for the occupying power, announcing matter-of-factly that his experience is needed. The others, the war-wounded, look as lost as strangers as they stand in the wreckage, without the slightest idea of what comes next.

But the viewers, with their knowledge of the historical facts, do know what comes next. They already knew what would happen when the five friends said their farewells in the summer of 1941 with the promise: "We'll see each other at Christmas." They are familiar with the deceptive nature of the euphoria that followed the first battles of encirclement and drove the German army, now sure of victory, into the broad expanses of Russian territory. They have learned that the SS paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen were raging behind the front, murdering large numbers of people, women and children included. They also know that the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, was also culpable, if only because it made these crimes against humanity possible in the first place.

Most of all, they know how quickly things went uphill for West Germany after Nazi capitulation. They are familiar with the German economic miracle as a form of compensation, with democracy and Western European unification under the protective cloak of the Allies. And then German partition, the Cold War and the war generation's long silence and efforts to repress the past, a generation that girded itself with the West German success story. And they know about the recurring shock waves of enlightenment, remembrance, shame, mourning and coming to terms with the past that have rolled across German society at regular intervals since the 1960s.

I'd like to see that.

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