Initially, his comrades deride him as a coward and beat him up, but the hardships and atrocities of the war eventually transform his character into that of a daring and ruthless killer. This fate destroys the last remnants of his idealism and when he finally returns to Berlin it is as an utterly broken man.įriedhelm (played by Tom Schilling) is a sensitive young man – a dreamer – more interested in literature than warfare and with no ambitions to be a soldier. Faced with the annihilation of his whole company, he breaks down and deserts the Wehrmacht, but is later captured as a deserter and deployed in a Strafbattalion (Penal Battalion). As the war progresses however, all hope for a quick victory evaporates and the tide of war changes, and Wilhelm’s idealism evaporates also. Wilhelm believes that he is bound by honour to fight gallantly for the Fatherland and is determined to do his duty. He provides the opening monologue for the episodes and when the plot jumps in time, he summarizes the developments that have occured in the meantime. Wilhelm (played by Volker Bruch) is the narrator of the story. The three 90 minute parts of the series are entitled, ‘ Eine andere Zeit’ (A Different Time), ‘Ein anderer Krieg’ ( A Different War), and ‘ Ein anderes Land’ (A Different Country). While Wilhelm, a young Wehrmacht officer and his younger brother Friedhelm go on to serve in the same platoon on the Eastern Front Charlotte volunteers to serve in a military hospital close to the front Greta tries to enlist the help of a Gestapo officer in establishing her career as a singer and her Jewish lover, Viktor, is eventually deported to a concentration camp but escapes and joins the Polish Partisans. The five friends meet in Berlin for a farewell party, and plan a Christmas reunion, unaware that their lives will soon change dramatically as the war unfolds bringing about the end of the world as they knew it. Their story begins on the eve of the German attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. The five young friends are brothers Wilhelm and Friedhelm a young nurse Charly aspiring singer Greta and her Jewish lover Viktor. There has been a mixed reaction to the recent broadcast on German TV of a three-part series entitled ‘Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter’ (‘Our Mothers, our Fathers’), depicting the effect that the Second World War conflict had on the lives of ordinary German citizens, and on the lives of five young Germans in particular.

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