if

Above: Billed as a German Band of
Brothers, Generation War vividly depicts
the lives of five young German friends
forced to navigate the unconscionable
moral compromises of life under
Hitler: Left to right, Katharine Schuttler
(Greta), Volker Bruch (Wilhelm),
Miriam Stein (Charlotte), Tom Schilling
(Friedhelm) and Ludwig Trepte (Viktor).

Clocking in at almost five hours,
World War II combat/Holocaust film
will screen at Maple Theater on Feb. 27.

George Robinson
Special to the Jewish News

next Marlene Dietrich; her boyfriend,
Viktor (Ludwig Trepte), is a Jew whose
father, a decorated veteran of the previ-
here is no art without limits, as
ous war, refuses to accept that they are no
Orson Welles once observed.
longer welcome in the new Germany; and
Creativity has its birth in con-
Charlotte (Miriam Stein), a young nurse
straint, and all art is bound by conven-
about to be sent to a surgical unit near the
tions. This is nowhere truer than in film
front, is hiding her unrequited love for
genres, those collections of familiar images,
Wilhelm.
settings, themes and tropes that serve as a
As might be expected, their paths are so
guide for both filmmakers and audiences.
completely intertwined that they will con-
Generation War, a massive new German
tinue to run into one another throughout
film that will have two screenings at the
the war.
Maple Theater in Bloomfield Township on
Friedhelm is assigned to his brother's
Thursday, Feb. 27, is an excellent example
unit. Charlotte will be reunited with them
of this principle in action.
repeatedly on the Eastern Front by circum-
Directed by Philipp Kadelbach from a
stance. When Viktor is deported to the
screenplay by Stefan Kolditz, this nearly
East despite Greta's efforts, he will eventu-
five-hour-long drama partakes of both
ally find himself facing Friedhelm. Greta's
the World War II combat film and the
career will have her touring the front, where
Holocaust film, tracing the lives of five
she will be reunited with the brothers and
friends from Berlin between 1941 and the
Charlotte with catastrophic results.
end of the war.
And so on.
In doing so, it manages simultaneously
The film's narrative functions thanks
to both conform to and tinker with the
largely to a Dickensian chain of coincidenc-
parameters of both genres, sometimes fruit- es that reduce the war to a grisly merry-
fully, sometimes less so.
go-round with a limited number of riders
Originally made as a three-part minise-
possible.
ries for German television and billed as a
An audience accepts such a universe as
German Band of Brothers, the film opens
part of the conventions of genre and the
in the snow and mud of the Russian winter, larger tropes of film narrative. A filmmaker
with Wilhelm (Volker Bruch) watching his
builds emotional resonance into his char-
brother Friedhelm (Tom Schilling) dashing
acters through the repetition-and-variation
ahead of white-clad Soviet troops as bullets
workings of those conventions, and by
whiz overhead.
manipulating them makes his own state-
His thoughts — and the narrative — go
ment about the world.
back to the eve of their departure for the
To their credit, Kadelbach and Kolditz
war, not quite a year before, an evening
are primarily interested in using their five
spent with their three closest friends.
protagonists to examine the ways in which
Greta (Katharina Schuttler) is an aspir-
ordinary Germans were swept up by war
ing singer-actress who sees herself as the
fever and gradually destroyed or disil-

T

Ot •

Forbidden love: Ludwig Trepte as the
Jewish Viktor Goldstein and Katherina
Schuttler as the German Greta Muller;
because of his Jewish background,
both of them live in constant fear of
being accused of Rassenschande (racial
shame, defilement or pollution).

lusioned by the realities of life in a fascist
nation under a government that lied to and
brutalized even its most loyal subjects.
Anyone expecting a hideous revisionism
or Holocaust denial will be — I'm happy to
say — disappointed. This film is in no way
an apology for the Nazis.
In fact, Generation War — eight years
in the making and filmed on more than
150 sets across Germany, Lithuania and
Latvia — has been lauded for its impact on
German TV audiences, sparking a passion-
ate discussion about personal responsibility
and the legacy of guilt for Nazi atrocities.
On the other hand, it is hard for an
American to see much difference from the
standard point of view in these film genres
over the past half-century.
Therein lies the problem with Generation
War. It is well crafted; the acting is, for the
most part, solid; and Kadelbach is particu-
larly good at the big-action set pieces, albeit
with considerable debt to directors Steven
Spielberg of Saving Private Ryan and to Sam
Peckinpalis underrated Cross of Iron.
But the film never rises above the level
of its technical expertise. Kolditz's script is

mainly interesting as a similarly technical
problem.
Even in a story as long as this one, an
audience can't be expected to maintain its
interest in or understanding of five separate
protagonists equally. It becomes necessary
to keep at least two of them in the same
narrative frame nearly all the time, and
watching how Kolditz does this is not with-
out a certain intellectual fascination.
The script, therefore, is mainly interest-
ing as a schematic diagram. The characters
never exist as more than a bundle of con-
ventions and a series of abstract vectors.
As a result, for too much of its running
time, one watches Generation War as an
abstract exercise in the working-out of
the narrative equivalent of an engineering
problem.
For a student of genre film, this effort
might be its own reward. For some audi-
ences, perhaps not.

❑

At press time, the Maple Theater
had planned two screenings of
Generation War, at noon and 5:30
p.m. Thursday, Feb. 27. The addition
of more dates is possible so check
the theater's website. Each two-
part screening, running a total of
270 minutes, includes a 15-minute
intermission. The film, in German,
is fully subtitled. Info and tickets:
(248) 750-1030; themapletheater.
com .

JN

February 20 • 2014

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