Generation War does something very un-German – bottles it

I was so looking forward to Generation War (BBC2, Saturday) — a three-part drama series covering the second world war from the perspective of five young men and women on the German side. Any nation capable of producing the ME-109, the 88mm gun and the Tiger tank, not to mention Das Boot, really ought to have no problem making one of the most authentic, searingly honest war dramas ever to hit our screens…

How wrong I was. Consider a scene from this week’s opening episode involving Friedhelm — bookish, bolshie, anti-war younger brother of the more pugnacious and efficient Leutnant Wilhelm Winter. There they are on the Eastern Front, in the depths of winter, and Friedhelm is on guard duty at night in a foxhole petulantly smoking a fag — in calculated defiance of a comrade’s plea to stub it out for fear of alerting the enemy.

Now in the British army this would have been a serious offence but in the Wehrmacht — which executed an estimated 50,000 of its men during the war — quite possibly a capital one. Sure enough, a Russian aircraft spots the glow of Friedhelm’s cigarette and bombs the German position, perhaps — though it’s not clear — killing some of his comrades. Friedhelm gets off with an ad hoc punishment beating, tacitly endorsed by his brother. Seriously?

‘My problem is that I don’t know how far I can trust any of this,’ said the Fawn as we watched. Exactly. Generation War has done that very unGerman thing and bottled it: it has ducked frank and fearless authenticity in favour of face-saving, intellectually dishonest, politically correct melodrama that leaves its audience feeling frustrated, cheated and rudderless.

Even when it gets it right, it gets it wrong.