[Z]

Did anyone watch this 3 part series? It was being shown on the BBC, each episode is an hour and a half long so it is just like watching a film trilogy... German series, about 5 young German people just as World War II is really kicking into gear in 1941 - two brothers about to go to the frontline, a girl about to go to the frontline as a nurse, a Jewish guy and a girl who dreams of being a singer and gets into a dangerous relationship with a high ranking Nazi.

I found it really gripping and brilliantly done, it's nice to see a World War II piece done from the German perspective because I think it's a taboo that you can't show German people as having suffered in any way during that era at all... and of course nobody is a winner in a war, everybody suffers in some way, so it was interesting to see how the two soldiers and the nurse went from believing the war hype machine to becoming broken people who didn't believe in anything anymore and seeing what happens to them all throughout the course of the drama.

There's been a lot of negative feedback because it portrays the five protagonists as victims and shows the Polish resistance army as being anti-Semitic but then it's not like anti-Semitism was limited to Nazi Germany; it was a widespread thing. It also showed the German nurse turning the Ukrainian Jewish nurse into the army, for example. The main point I took from it was that it didn't really matter your nationality or your beliefs, everybody suffered and was treated terribly, nobody trusted anybody and the war ruined an entire generation and right now in 2014 is probably when everybody who was old enough to remember the war and to have lived through it will start to die if they aren't already dead; it ended almost 70 years ago. It's important I think to show this side to World War II. It's been taboo for too long to show any kind of self pitying on the side of the Germans because they've been forced to take on all of the guilt for what happened.

Would really recommend it to anyone who's interested in WWII basically, it's not a documentary, it's a drama, but it's really well shot, quite high budget by the looks of it and it's a really gripping story. I think Charlotte, Viktor and Greta are more interesting characters than the two brothers on the frontline (Friedhelm and Wilhelm) but all of their stories are fascinating.