Admiral & Generation War

While I’m on the topic of war movies, I might as well follow up with these two, which are Russian and German, and well worth the viewing.  Both are fairly recent.

Admiral (DVD).  In Russian with English subtitles.  A historical romance about Admiral Kolchak, the White Russian leader during the Russian Civil War (RCW).  After the Bolsheviks murdered the Romanovs in Sverdlovsk in July 1918, the Whites were left without an obvious leader.  Several generals and this admiral popped up to try to assert that role, desperately courting Allied favor and support.  The British and French latched on to this guy, operating in the East, to somehow make something happen.  As we can guess, it didn’t quite work out. 

            Never mind that he was a Navy officer – apparently one of Russia’s few naval heroes from WWI, a war in which the Russians were usually on the losing end of most battles – active well inland without a single ship or fleet under his command.  The chaos of the war left him with scarcely any armies to command either.  Once the Bolsheviks had taken care of the White armies back west, they turned their attention east, made a deal with the Czechs, and outmaneuvered the White forces in this part of Russia, including Kolchak.

            But there’s some juicy romance here as well.  It turns out he had the hots for one of his fellow Russian naval officer’s wives, Anna Timireva, and the two had an affair during the RCW.  When the second Revolution broke out in October 1917, his wife and son managed to escape off to Paris, which left him free to pursue Anna.   She decided to stay with him as much as she could, so their relationship blossomed in the middle of a crazy, chaotic war. 

            The movie starts with his WWI heroics, some scenes with the February and October Revolutions (1917) (he meets Kerensky, but Lenin & Co. are off-camera) and then his role in the RCW, gradually going east by train across Siberia, his forces melting away around him.  He is captured by the Czech Legion and turned over to the Bolsheviks and shot. 

            It’s a decent film, not too long, with good production values: and it turns out that Anna survived all the way to the 1970s (though she was sporadically imprisoned several times over that period).  The Bolsheviks play little role in the film, too minor to even count as villains.  Kolchak comes off as a tragic hero defeated by a mostly offscreen nemesis – fortunately enjoying an on-screen mistress, though the romance is more implied than explicitly intimate. 

            The most obvious comparison would be with “Dr. Zhivago”.  That film gives us more of the Red side of the equation, but even with competing romances, the older film drags on.  It feels like we could walk across Russia’s vast empty expanses by foot in the time it takes the damn film to finish up.  Prefer something short and sweet?  Non-Red?  In Russian?  “Admiral” is your movie.

           

Generation War (Blu-Ray).  In German with English subtitles.  This came by the local artsy theater but I didn’t find out until the run had ended.  Then it turned out the DVD became available, so I bought it.  This is a very recent film about Germany during WWII from the perspective of 5 young people:

1.         Older brother Wilhelm Winter, a Wehrmacht 2LT.  As with most of these war movies, he’s the smart, sympathetic, idealistic, honorable Army officer leading his men as best he can.  After Stalingrad he’s convinced the war cannot be won, and eventually winds up in a penal battalion after deserting – lucky not to be simply shot.

2.         Younger brother Friedhelm Winter, a Wehrmacht private.  Nominally a coward, ultimately he turns into a very good soldier (10x better than Samwell Tarly), but he’s about as cynical as Wilhelm.  Instead of vocalizing his dissatisfaction he just goes with the flow and tries to survive.  He really doesn’t say much. 

3.         Viktor Goldstein, a Jew.  He’s a young, handsome guy and the BF of Greta, the singer.  Like many German Jews, he can pass for Aryan but arouse suspicions depending on his behavior.  He’s sent to Auschwitz but manages to escape the transport train and join Polish partisans who are just as anti-semitic as the Nazis, so he has to keep his identity hidden.  Mostly he keeps his mouth shut.

4.         Charlotte (Charly), a cute, peppy, German girl, Wilhelm’s fiancé.  She volunteers as a nurse on the Eastern Front and sees some nasty stuff.  As you can imagine, her youthful idealism and good cheer soon dry up.  Charly befriends a Jewish nurse and a Russian girl, and even winds up in bed with the unit’s doctor, an older father figure, but only because Friedhelm told her that Wilhelm had died.  When she does meet Wilhelm again, among the living, she’s torn between joy at his survival and grief at cheating on him.  Like Friedhelm she accepts and understands German guilt for the war but unlike Wilhelm, who acts out and verbalizes his anger and bitterness, Charly absorbs it more like blows on her soul, which she absorbs on behalf of her guilty country and conscience. 

5.         Greta del Torres, Viktor’s GF, a popular singer.  She also sees unpleasant things.  She has an affair with the local Gestapo officer which ends poorly – with her in prison.  Although easily the most glamorous character, she’s also the least interesting.  She tried to save Viktor, but that effort backfired into Viktor’s deportation and her own arrest.  The glamorous singer wilts and decays in prison, kept alive only by her hatred for the regime. 

            The movie is very violent, and shows a small amount of Einsatzgruppen action (though none of the main characters are directly involved).  It covers the period 1941-45, but all the combat is Eastern Front and all enemy soldiers are Soviet, who also come off as very brutal, e.g. they capture a hospital and simply shoot all the German soldiers who are patients left behind.   In fact, there’s lots of combat.  Plus the tanks are authentic: Tigers and T34s, so us WWII buffs can really sink our teeth into it.  Warning, though, it is long: 3 90 minute parts, or 4.5 hours total.  It was a miniseries in Germany.

            The basic theme is that World War II took and destroyed an entire generation of Germany, stuffing it through the meat grinder of war, atrocity and depravity - the women too, and not just the men.  However, it’s not too much on the “let’s feel sorry for ourselves because of all the horrible things that happened to us during the war.”  Wilhelm is the most vocal in not merely articulating defeatism, but also acknowledging Germany’s fault in starting the war.  When an SS officer brutally murders a Jewish child at point blank, the viewer knows the movie is not apologizing for Nazi Germany.  Soviet brutality is not merely expected: it’s well deserved. 

            “Final Victory has been cancelled,” is the sentence Greta utters to a squad of horny German soldiers, deflating their egos, and landing her in prison.  “Final Victory” is the phrase uttered by the uber-Nazi nurse Hildegard – because anything else is unthinkable.  Even Wilhelm isn’t overly troubled that Germany started the war – invading Czechoslovakia (March 1939), Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, etc. countries without the means nor the inclination to threaten or oppose Germany – until after Stalingrad.  Are we the bad guys because we’re losing the war, or are we losing the war because we’re the bad guys?  Could the generals and leaders stupid enough to waste the goodwill of the Eastern Europeans by mistreating them, be also stupid enough not to manage a war against Stalin & the West at the same time?  The same arrogance which leads us Germans to brutalize the Russians and Ukrainians who welcomed us as liberators, could be the same arrogance persuading us that we can somehow defeat three major powers simultaneously? 

            With the Russians pushing us back on all sectors of the Eastern Front, with the Allies in Italy and France, with the people at home pulverized by bombing raids – can the war possibly be won?  Of course not.  Will our enemies meekly stop at the German borders and allow us to continue as we were? Of course not.  Will the Russians be gentle and kind when they rampage through the ruined streets of Berlin?  Of course not.  What we sowed, so shall we reap.  But if the Fuhrer, who must know something we don’t, promises “Final Victory”, despite all the evidence to the contrary, which would we rather believe?  “Final Victory” is what we cling to, desperately.  This is the only hope of Generation War.