| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Breathtakingly-brilliant in its direction, this is probably the best tv series ever made and certainly one of the best acted. Readily reminding one of the best that tv can produce - when it really tries, but so rarely does. Totally engrossing and totally compelling, despite the avant-garde style from the maverick director Edgar REITZ, this is stunning drama.
The characterization is complete in itself and our dramatic experience grows as they grow into people we come to care for. Yet the style is that of a movie so that everything seems too big to fit the frame and is about to explode through our consciousness.
The two themes that stick out are that of the contradictory impulses to leave home and yet return, and of successful communication-through-technology compared with often-unsuccessful personal communication.
Unlike the travesty Holocaust, with its risible melodrama, this avoids the usual German crocodile tears and evasion of guilt so characteristic of any depiction of the Nazi period. Rather than indulge in the unfulfillable desire to return to the security of the womb, this story makes a very good fist at dealing with the real issues of German twentieth-century history. It fails somewhat at dealing with violent class conflicts and the general political struggles in Germany by being a little too bucolic and bourgeois for its own good. But these failings never threaten to derail (by sentimentalizing) the general brilliance on show here.
Like all former imperial powers, Germany has been unable to mourn both the loss of that power and thus to move on toward other forms of national identity. Guilt and shame means being unable to remember and to tell stories about the past - the means by which culture is transmitted to the young - because infamous historical events obstruct this necessary grieving process. The inability to talk about a past that troubles us is emotionally-stifling and is what informs much of this heavyweight drama. And few other European cultures have taken such an unflinching look at the unpleasantness of their own national histories and tried so hard to lay its past to rest.
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