A German Movie Story

For a number of years after WW II.....German film production companies (either independent or via ARD public TV) simply didn't make movies over the 1930s to 1945.  In the early 1980s....came Das Boot, which changed the perception and opened up the door to occasional movies of this era.  Some of them.....I will admit....are first-class productions (Sophie Scholl, Before the Fall, etc).

This week, a Polish court stood up and pronounced judgement over a public TV production...."Unsere Mutter, Unsere Vater" or the English translation title: The Generational War.

ZDF (the junior partner under ARD) produced mini-series 'movie'.  There are three episodes to it....each to 90 minutes. 

I've watched the movie and would basically say that the script goes along this line....five young Germans (three men and two women) are friends in the late 1930s....the war starts, and they are thrown into a spiral with their lives mostly destroyed by the end of the war.  I will say that the storyline is four-star....decent acting, and it's a fairly intense movie.  As war movies go, it's a good production and worth watching. 

A number of scenes are placed in Poland during the war, and there was an effort by the production team to slant this scene (or act) as negative against the Poles.  This started up a national talk in Poland because so many of them watched the movie there.  They felt that the movie was an insult.

So all of this got into the court system (yes, they sued).

The Poles won the case, and there is to be an apology by ZDF and some 'compensation' (the amount wasn't exactly laid out and I seriously doubt if it's more than a hundred-thousand Euro). 

ZDF?  Well....they say they will appeal.  In their words....there is freedom of expression and they simply told this fictionalized story in a particular way.  Yeah, it's a pretty lousy comment to make but they really can't explain why these particular scenes had to be done in some slanted way.

Here's the thing about this particular movie...it won awards, and the rights to broadcast sold in a major way.  Various networks in Europe came and paid cash for the showing rights.  ZDF doesn't openly talk about production costs but it was often mentioned as one of the most expensive movie projects that the public TV network had ever taken on.  It's quiet possible that with DVD release and international networks showing it.....they may have actually paid for the production and even made some profit off the movie.

So I come to the problem of making a WW II German war movie.  To make all the nationalities happy, and suit the historians....you'd have to make some epic forty-hour mini-series and tell over one-hundred character stories.  Even when you do documentary pieces today over the 1930s and the war era, the viewers will often engage in serious critique of documentary construction and jump on the lack of this story, or this 'evil'.  It's near impossible to make everyone happy. 

I suspect that ZDF really doesn't want to admit a loss on this production, and apologize because it then opens up all kinds of potential in future productions where they continually have to say 'sorry'.  The odds of this legal case going to the EU court?  Probably a 99-percent chance.