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. It was one of the most-watched German television productions of its decade, with over seven million viewers per episode in Germany alone, and one of the most internationally controversial.

Berlin, 1941. Five young friends say goodbye to each other and promise to meet again next Christmas: 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). The series follows them through the next four years of the war, on the Eastern Front and on the home front, with the Holocaust never out of frame.

It was the first major German prestige production to depict the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust at this scale and from inside the German experience, and that is why it travelled and why it provoked. The reception in Poland was particularly hostile, with protests over the broadcast and a formal complaint from the Polish government to ZDF, over what many there saw as a soft-pedalling of the Polish role in the resistance and over its depiction of the Polish Home Army. The English-language broadcast on BBC Two in 2014, and the international release that followed, kept the argument going.