ORDINARY PEOPLE

At the beginning of the ambitious German television miniseries “Generation War,” five young friends (three men and two women) dance and drink in a Berlin bar. The time is June, 1941. Two of the men are heading to the Eastern Front, but the Führer has promised that the war will be over by Christmas, and the mood is charged, even celebratory. “The whole world lay before us. We just had to take it,” one of the men says, narrating. Four years (and four and a half hours) later, after Germany’s defeat, the survivors reassemble in the same bar. The bookends pull the series together, but the banality of the device is almost comical. “Generation War” (originally titled “Our Mothers, Our Fathers”) was a sensational success in Germany and Austria when it aired there, last year. It depicts an enormous range of experience: vicious combat with the Red Army, ambushes, life in wartime hospitals, moments of shock and disillusionment. Yet it depends on the conventions of soap opera and popular melodrama (is a soldier hit with machine-gun fire really still alive?), and some of it comes close to inanity. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, with more than three million men, yet these five people keep bumping into one another on the Eastern Front as if they were crisscrossing a large fairground. “Generation War” has the strengths and the weaknesses of middlebrow art: it may be clunky, but it’s never dull, and, once you start watching, you can’t stop. Commissioned by the German television company ZDF (headquartered in Mainz), the series has been picked up by Music Box Films for theatrical release in this country, as a two-part movie; an airing on a cable network is also planned.The director, Philipp Kadelbach, and the writer, Stefan Kolditz, have said that their intention was to start a dialogue with Germans who lived through the war. That idea might have made more sense a decade or so ago, when there were more people left to talk to. It’s a little late now for this film to serve as the basis of a moral conversation. Still, better late than never, I suppose. The filmmakers have produced a collective portrait of a generation: Wilhelm (Volker Bruch), stern and responsible, is a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht; he squares his jaw and does his duty. His bookish kid brother, Friedhelm (Tom Schilling), serves in the same unit, but he hates war and mutters bitter asides between battles. The brothers are fond of Greta (Katherina Schüttler), a singer who wants to be the next Marlene Dietrich, and her lover, Viktor (Ludwig Trepte), a Jewish tailor who has managed to get by in Berlin, a relatively liberal city, where anti-Semitism is not as virulent as elsewhere in Germany. The fifth member of the group is Charlotte, called Charly (Miriam Stein), an ardent and idealistic nurse. She and Wilhelm are in love but are afraid to tell each other. (Really? In wartime, young people tend not to be so hesitant.) Except for Viktor, they all do terrible things. The brothers take part in executions; Charly betrays someone who trusted her; Greta sleeps with a loathsome S.S. officer, first to protect Viktor, then to boost her career. “Generation War” has been much praised in Germany for its sense of accountability. The old accepted notion that the barbarians were confined to the S.S. and the Gestapo has been cast aside. The series acknowledges what scholars have established in recent years: that the Wehrmacht played a major role in committing atrocities in the occupied countries.“Generation War” doesn’t center on the war against Jews and other minorities, but the Holocaust has been widely discussed in Germany, and maybe this time the focus can be elsewhere. There are, however, other omissions and silences. Aside from Viktor, the characters are fervently patriotic but not ideological. They are surrounded by the S.S., yet none of them become committed Nazis. They are meant to be overwhelmingly young—a little foolish, not terribly perceptive, and essentially innocent. Is this a convincing picture of educated Berlin youths in 1941? By the time the story begins, the Nazis have advanced across Europe, invaded the Soviet Union, and killed Jews by the thousands in occupied lands. Jews have been disappearing even in Berlin. While destroying one myth, the filmmakers have built up another. The movie says that young men and women were seduced and then savagely betrayed—brutalized by what the Nazis and the war itself put them through. Their complicity, in this account, is forced, never chosen. Aimed at today’s Germans, who would like, perhaps, to come to a final reckoning with the war period, “Generation War” is an appeal for forgiveness. But the movie sells dubious innocence in the hope of eliciting reconciliation.

That said, the depiction of war is detailed, raw, and often moving. Kadelbach uses newsreel footage, and the grimy, blurred images of blitzkrieg and retreat are incomparable as an evocation of force and panic. After each newsreel segment, Kadelbach picks up with the brothers’ Wehrmacht unit. He knits together scenes of staged fighting with much greater coherence than the directors of the American TV series “Band of Brothers” did, especially in an attack on a fixed Soviet position in a rubble-strewn street, which may be the best representation of close combat ever filmed. Kadelbach has a tactile feeling for terrain, weather, and the everyday horrors of a soldier’s life. When not fighting the Red Army, Wilhelm and Friedhelm miserably do the criminal work of killing Russian civilians and Polish partisans. American viewers, wondering how we might have responded under such extreme pressure, will regard these Germans with intense curiosity: What did they think they were doing? What happened to them? Friedhelm, a virtual noncombatant at first, suffers an internal collapse (“You resist the temptation to be human,” he says) and turns into a cold-eyed killer who no longer cares whether he lives or dies. The disillusionment of his disciplined brother, Wilhelm, is more complicated. Disgusted and increasingly rebellious, Wilhelm goes awol for a while. He tries to survive morally as well as physically. Does this portrait amount to special pleading for a Wehrmacht officer? While re-creating the vast swing of German forces in and out of Russia, Kadelbach tries to capture the inner turmoil of two men. Call it half a victory.