Exactly. And he's got a particularly dark arc, as one might imagine. It's very easy to lose your humanity under Nazism.

Yeah the protagonists of Generation War are often better than the other non-Jewish Germans in the series, by they also have significant failings (how much varies.)

No idea. If it is airing as a movie in the US that may be the only legal way to see it for a while.

There are no battle scenes in the Western Front. It's all Eastern Front, which is fitting as that's the main theatre if war for Germany and where a majority of their soldiers died.

Well nobody is saying any of these things are anywhere near as bad as the Holocaust, but that we have allowed morally questionable things to occur on our watch might give us pause if we feel we would have really made a difference about the Holocaust were we Aryan Germans of the 1940s.

And I can't stress enough how impressive a miniseries it is. I don't think turning it into a film is particularly wise, frankly (but since Das Boot is well known as a movie in the US and subtitled TV is an obscure niche, I can understand them not going the way of other countries) because what makes it stand out as a…

Quite so. I remember reading somewhere that study of the Native American genocide became pretty big in Germany academicallly pretty much from the late 1940s, which is surely in no way significant.

That's true. I think it's be fair to find a lot of problems in GW's approach - some have argued the modernism of the character's views verge on the ahistorical (and I think the Other Site has a pretty excellent breakdown), but it does try to avoid anything quite as pat as 'well only some bad people did this.' We also…

Weirdly, there was a genre of films in East Germany called Indianerfilme that recast Westerns from the Native American's POV:
http://indianerfilm.narod.r…

…huh. For some reason I thought New Girl was New York. It's always one or the other.

And then Schmidt just stops trying to have his metaphor make any kind of sense.

Right, only that is not why they are fighting, that is specifically why they (these specific characters, mostly the two that are soldiers) commit atrocities. Wilhelm has a speech in one episode about how soldiers begin fighting for their country, and then fighting for their buddies… only when is he deprived of both it…

To be fair one of then actually confused himself with the other one once.

I choose to assume this is Friday Night Lights Babies, complete with a teenaged Coach Taylor.

Eh, I liked it.

Well it's unfortunate that this was released as a film as it's better experienced as a three part miniseries. I can only wonder to what extent it was cut down for the still fairly substantial running time.

Each episode is enormously long, at that.

That's not what it is like, though. Over the course of the series one character goes to great lengths to save a Jewish person but another one turns one in. They shoot Russian civilians. It's not about being non-culpable as much as it is about simply being alive and part of Nazi Germany.

That's actually a major plot point of Genration War (a lot of it takes place on the Russian Front.) It's not that what all the characters do are blameless - many of then do terrible things, sometimes because they're ordered to or they're afraid.

Well at least the episode shows how having Cece at the bar means no hassle ways of working her into an episode. They can have casual conversations between Cece, Schmidt and Winston - two of them - without explaining why she's here.