No movie again tonight, but I did begin a gripping TV mini-series from Germany called "Generation War" (2013). The title popped up in an IMDB recommendation when I was looking up the movie "Rotation", which I watched and reviewed about a week ago. "Rotation" was so good that I decided to stay in WW2 mode, and I ordered "Generation War" from The Libe. The show is divided into three parts, each 90 minutes long. Tonight I watched Part One, which begins early in the war in 1941, and centers around a group of five young German people, three guys and two girls, who are all close friends. Two of the friends are brothers who have enlisted in the German Army and will soon be shipping out to the Russian front. One of the five friends is Jewish, a young man who is the boyfriend of a singer. She is also one of the friends and has a dream to make it big in show business.
All five of the young friends are aware of the changing political climate in Germany, and fully aware of the war, but the two soldier brothers assure the other three friends that it will be overwith very quickly, and they suggest a reunion of all the friends in Berlin, on Christmas 1941.
But boy do things ever change for all of them in the six months that follow.
One review called "Generation War" the "German 'Band Of Brothers' ", making a comparison with the classic Spielberg/Hanks WW2 miniseries from about 15 years ago. That one focused on an American group of friends whose lives were changed when they went off to war, so the comparison is apt. This time, in "Generation War", the story is told from the German point of view, in a story that focuses not on Nazis but on ordinary soldiers and their girlfriends; young people just beginning their adulthood - all of whom had their lives upended by the war and the Nazi regime.
What is shown, at least in Part One (and I am sure the story will continue in this way), was that not all of Germany was gung-ho for Hitler, and indeed both of the brothers (who are soldiers and also two of the five initial friends) are horrified at what they witness in Russia, the atrocities committed by the SS. These brothers are sons of a military father who fought in World War One. They have followed in his footsteps and enlisted in what they had believed was another just war, a righteous war in the name of protecting Germany. But then, when they get to Russia they see the diabolical reality. And the other three friends experience their own trials, the one I have not yet mentioned is the girlfriend of the elder soldier brother. She volunteers to become a nurse at the front in Russia. She winds up working with another more experienced nurse who takes her under her wing......but this older nurse happens to be hiding a secret. She is Jewish, and so the younger nurse is left with a terrible dilemma ; to report the woman and thereby save herself, or to keep her heritage a secret and risk getting caught.
This is the German side of the war, told from the perspective of young people and the nearly impossible situation they found themselves in.
I harp on the Nazis, and I watch movies about WW2, and it hits home because my Dad was in the war, but maybe even more than that, I think it hits home for me because I have an intense interest in human nature. I am interested, in a basic sense, about morality and why humans commit violence, and in the broadest possible explanation, we can say that violence is emotion-driven, and that babies cry and children throw tantrums and adolescents fight and rebel, but then.....gradually, the violent instinct - the emotional impulse that quick-triggers a violent outburst, be it a screaming match or a punch in the nose - is unlearned as we grow older. We learn to unlearn the anger we feel as powerless children, and we learn to unlearn it as we ourselves become adults and as we begin to experience the wear and tear of adulthood. We begin to feel the graduated emotions that (hopefully) our parents felt when they became adults, and that they tried to pass down to us. And hopefully, we grow up to be civil to others.
But then, there was once a society called Nazi Germany, where a Herd Mentality was created by the leadership that not only accepted violence but demanded it. A sociopathic mentality toward cruelty and horrific brutality became acceptable as the standard policy of an entire nation. And while not all Germans participated in this orgy of violence and destruction, enough did to cause a World War in which 60 million lives were lost in 5 1/2 years. Broken down, that comes out to approximately 30, 000 people killed per day, for almost six years. What has blown my mind about this place - Nazi Germany - is that it existed until only 15 years before I was born.
That's nothing. Fifteen years is nothing. But precisely because it happened before I was born, makes it seem like something from Ancient History, like The Roman Empire. It took me until my late 30s or thereabouts to realise - Holy Smokes! These people were in power just twenty years before The Beatles hit it big.
And to get back to my fascination with the Nazis, and WW2, my interest lies not just in the violence they were capable of, but in the fact that a nationwide organised group of hundreds of thousands of Nazis and SS were all capable, in coordinated unison, of not just wartime killing of enemy soldiers but of old people and children in the most terrible ways.
A whole nation - and not a third world so-called "primitive" nation but a white, supposedly civilised nation of advanced science - became subject to the Truly Demonic Power of a system, Nazism, that was peopled by men that were not motivated just by the violent tendencies that we all inherit from childhood, but something far worse.
When you watch these movies and shows about the Third Reich, what you see is Cold Blooded Sociopathy on a National Scale. Men who could, en masse, wake up every day and commit the most horrific brutalities the world had ever seen, or at least equal to those in other countries where The Devil has taken hold.
But the Nazis set the standard for evil as perpetrated by White Europeans, and they were angry and determined enough to frighten an entire nation and place that nation under a police state. And then after that, they carried out a program that - truly speaking - can only be described as The Devil Here On Earth.
And all of this happened only 15 years before I was born.
It is very important to me to understand the world I live in, and not just to brush past history, and get lost in the 24/7 turnaround of things, to get lost in "the News".
I am concerned with the eternity of things. I believe in eternal life, certainly not for genocidal war criminals and other demonic souls......but I guess that's where the connection lies, in the crossover.
As concerns WW2, and the Third Reich, which was the most evil organised faction that ever hit this planet, I am interested not in how it came to be, in how it came to power, because we know all of that, from a multitude of history books and movies and testimonials.
What I am interested in, though, is where the Evil came from. Because Germany is full of good people nowdays. And it was full of good people before WW2, and WW1.
We have briefly explored the infantile and childhood/adolescent urges toward violent emotions here in this blog, and we know the economic reasons that pushed Germany into a bottomless recession after WW1. We can understand the desperation of that country.
But what we cannot understand, no matter how many movies we make or how many books we write, is how such a situation arose there just 80 years ago that allowed the Nazis to take power. Not just warlike men, but demonic men, powered by the end of the world.
This is grim stuff, I realise, and not much fun to read about. But now the Germans of the new generation are making films about it from their own perspective. They are confronting it, and it is incredibly important that they do so.
It is gonna take another hundred years - at least - to understand the Demonic Influence that infected Germany in the 1930s, and allowed a huge group of Sociopaths to come together, and find one another and organise in the way that they did.
And it must be studied so that it never happens again.
I am just one of the people who feels compelled to study it, which is why I watch a lot of these types of films and also read so many books on the subject.
We have to study not only where violence comes from, but where cold blooded evil comes from, and to do that, you have to be willing to engage, and study, evil in the spiritual realm.
You have to be a Spiritual Warrior for the Good Side.
That's all I know for tonight. :)
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