War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.
-Heraclitus
Kitsch. The problem with kitsch is that it’s predatory. By its very nature, kitsch panders to an onlooker’s sentimental yearnings. It expects nothing of its beholders, and is content to elicit an emotional response. Yes, there may not be anything wrong per se about sentimentality, but kitsch is deviously cynical about its sentimentality. Rather than trying to discover a meaningful source of sentiment, kitsch simply vomits the cultural focal points that its creators know would elicit an emotional response, which is certainly a cynical take on art. Art is supposed to stand for something, not just prey on our emotions.
I had watched Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, titled Generation War on Netflix (I suppose English-speaking viewers would not get the emotional oomph of the title), and my growing realization that the mini-series was first-rate kitsch inspired me to write about kitsch. Just after watching it, I had an overwhelmingly positive opinion of the mini-series. It was good to have a German perspective of the Second World War, and all of the emotional moments in the series certainly hit home. Thinking back upon the series, though, I cannot escape the conclusion that it was kitsch.
Looking back at the title, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, it’s very easy for the German viewers to look at the five sympathetic protagonists, and to actually think that they were their ancestors. The genuine Nazis are kept at a sanitized distance as secondary characters with whom we never entirely get to sympathize with. Yet, if the mini-series is truly going to be about Our Mothers, Our Fathers then where are the Germans who were members of NSDAP? Rather than actually grappling with war guilt, the series simply depicts the people with whom we are meant to sympathize with as victims, which is disappointing.
Scene after scene, the message that human beings are just cattle for the slaughter when nations clash is hammered into the viewer’s head to the point one can be for forgiven for forgetting the popularity of the war among Germans. Yes, there are Nazis in the series, but they are always other people. The protagonists are much too clear thinking to fall for such propaganda, which fails to grapple with the material the title promises: the war-time experiences of that generation of Germans. Instead, the writers simply exploit the audiences sentiments from scene to scene as we watch sympathetic protagonists, who don’t really even participate in the more unnerving parts of the Third Reich’s war, be ground into the dirt underneath the machine of war. It’s effective, it’s emotional, and it’s complete kitsch. There are two scenes (no spoilers), each with one of the two brothers, that kind of break the grand arc of protagonist-as-victim, yet I think it’s much too little, and still carrying a protagonist-as-victim vibe.
Needless to say, I’m not the target audience of Unsere Mütter, unsere väter. Nor do I believe it was terrible. It’s certainly worth the time to watch, yet it’s sadly just isn’t as good as it could be. Where Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter fails is recognizing that all good plots are matters of choices and then those choices’ consequences. Instead, things simply happen to the protagonist in this series, and then we, as an audience, are supposed to then sympathize with them as little more than victims. Not human beings with moral agency, but as passive victims.