Generation War
2013
Original language: German
- war & politics
- drama
- action & adventure
The story
Career-soldier Wilhelm, his pacifist younger brother Friedhelm, and their friends Charlotte, Viktor and Greta say farewell in the summer of 1941 in Berlin, with the promise to meet again after the war.
What it’s like
Cold, desaturated daylight and sepia-tinted interiors give Generation War a look of faded family photographs, with handheld camera work that stays close to faces during dinners, dance-hall evenings and field hospitals. The Eastern Front scenes shift to bleached snow, mud and smoke, while Berlin is rendered in warm amber lamplight that makes the city feel like the last comfortable room before the winter. Sound leans on period jazz and dance music, then drops into hard silence or the flat crack of gunfire, so the contrast does much of the work. Its vibe is elegiac and anxious, a slow-building dread wrapped around youthful optimism. It suits a long evening in with the lights low, though it asks for full attention. The pace is steady across three feature-length episodes, and the emotional arcs follow friends who drift apart and are changed by the war in different ways: a soldier losing his certainty, a pacifist testing his conscience, a young woman caught between loyalty and survival. Intensity is high: frequent combat violence, brutal wounds and deaths, some sexual content, and recurring antisemitic cruelty and wartime atrocity that land heavily rather than gratuitously. This is for viewers who want a serious, humane historical drama about ordinary people under the Nazi regime, not gentle escapism.
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