Well produced account of 5 German friends from 1941-1945, a Jewish tailor (pretty obvious, but never mind), 2 brothers who are just about to enlist in the campaign on the eastern front, a nurse and a hopeful singer. Some die, some survive with their souls in ruins. The primary problem for this series is that it is way to short. Most of the five lead characters have unexplained motivations for their various actions because we don't know enough about them. One can make educated guesses, but these does not make a lot of sense from a storytelling perspective. This is especially unfortunate, when a lot of the supporting characters have much more clear-cut motivations and are played by better actors. A lot of the power that could have been derived from telling a WW2 story from the German side is lost when our protagonists are this flat. The story is fiction, but are supposedly inspired by stories from several survivors. If you would like to see a better story from the German perspective, the movie "Stalingrad" or the Epic TV-series "Heimat" (1984), which deals with the entire period from 1919-1982, is much better than this. So we are still waiting for a really good German antiwar series that explains what the hell went wrong back then... This is not it, but it is still worth a look.
Review of Generation War
