Generation War

Philipp Kadelbach's Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter) launched on ZDF in March 2013 across three feature-length episodes, and won the Deutscher Fernsehpreis for Best Multi-Part Drama, the Bambi Award for Best German Television Drama, and the International Emmy for Best TV Movie / Mini-Series. The series became one of the most-watched German television productions of its decade — over seven million viewers per episode in Germany alone — and one of the most internationally controversial.

Berlin, 1941. Five young friends — the Wehrmacht-officer brothers Wilhelm and Friedhelm Winter (Volker Bruch and Tom Schilling), the Jewish tailor Viktor Goldstein (Ludwig Trepte), his Aryan-German girlfriend Greta (Katharina Schüttler) who longs to be a singer, and the nurse Charlotte (Miriam Stein) — say goodbye to each other in Berlin and promise to meet again next Christmas. The series follows them through the next four years across the Eastern Front, the Holocaust, the home front, and the Soviet entry into Berlin.

The series became internationally consequential as the first major German prestige television production to depict the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust at this scale and from inside the German experience. Polish national reception was particularly hostile — protests at the IT broadcast, a Polish-government formal complaint to ZDF — over what was widely received as a soft-peddling of the Polish role in resistance and the depiction of the Polish Home Army. The English-language broadcast on BBC Two later in 2014 and the subsequent international release continued the conversation.