Kolditz's father, movie director Gottfried Kolditz, who worked for the East German DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), was born in 1922 and died in1982. Writer Stefan Kolditz was approached by producer Nico Hofmann in 2005 to make a film about the generation of their parents. Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, Board Member of the New York Film/Video Council, saw the film in the context of her long career as German Film Coordinator at the Goethe Institute.Īs the moderator, I started out with brief statements from the filmmakers from March 2013, as no one involved with the making of Generation War was present for the discussion. Oliver Mahrdt, representative for the German Film Industry in the United States and Canada, talked about the reception of the film in Germany and the US. On January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and coinciding with the theatrical screenings of the four and a half hour film in two parts at Film Forum in New York, NYU Deutsches Haus hosted a panel discussion with Juliane Camfield, Director of Deutsches Haus, introducing the evening.Īndrew Nagorski, author of the 2012 book Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses To The Nazi Rise To Power, who was Berlin bureau chief for Newsweek from 1996-1999 and Bonn bureau chief from 1985-88, addressed what he sees as a troubling 'double shift of responsibility' in Generation War. In an interview, Kolditz called them 'those thrown straight from school into a war that made them perpetrators.' The original title, Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter (Our Mothers, Our Fathers) refers to the generation of those born around 1920. The performances are outstanding, the battle scenes filmed by cinematographer David Slama and edited by Bernd Schlegel pull you in and yet the plot choices remain controversial. Greta is an aspiring singer involved with Viktor, a tailor who is Jewish, escapes deportation and joins Polish partisans.

Two brothers, Wilhelm and Friedhelm are Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front. The film stars Volker Bruch, Tom Schilling, Katharina Schüttler, Miriam Stein and Ludwig Trepte as five friends in Berlin, June 1941 whom we follow throughout the war. Philipp Kadelbach's Generation War, written by Stefan Kolditz, and produced by Nico Hofmann for the ZDF was first shown on German and Austrian television in 2013 on the evenings of March 17, 18 and 20, in 90 minute episodes as a three-part miniseries.

Oliver Mahrdt, Andrew Nagorski, Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, with moderator Anne-Katrin Titze on Generation War Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

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