#(it's actually been a much better place since it's not just volker bruch fans anymore lol)

[berlinbabylon]

Hi! A few weeks ago, in an answer, you made reference to Volker Bruch's role in Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter. I've never seen it and had been wanting to (although I'm arguably less motivated now that Volker Bruch has been so ... ugh lately), but would you mind expanding upon what you meant? This whole situation is so disappointing and frustrating (but I say this as someone who only discovered BB/VB in December of last year)!

Oh boy, where to begin! The issues with Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter are so layered. I guess I'll break it down into: (1) Issues with the miniseries itself, and (2) issues with the reception of it.

1) So as to the first point, it's been a long time since I saw and I don't want to be too negative about it. It's well-made and some parts of it are better than others. I remember that I didn't think the writing was great (that's true for many German productions where the scripts tend to be the weak link), like it relied too much on coincidental meetings of characters in unlikely scenarios and so on. But okay, whatever. The actual issue with the miniseries arises from the way in which it was titled and marketed ("our mothers, our fathers" – of course Generation War sounds a bit more oblique in English and obfuscates that the people behind the miniseries wanted to do something that was supposedly representative of what "our" immediate ancestors went through during the war). From a historian's POV, the group of young people that they chose to focus on was really not in any way, shape or form representative of most young German people at the time and you can't blame the Polish for being pissed about the representation they got (which painted the Polish partisans as antisemitic and the issue with that wasn't that antisemitism didn't exist among Polish partisans but rather that the way the miniseries emphasizes their antisemitism while being way too revisionist about the German protagonists in that regard is just not a good look). A history professor put everything into words that I was thinking back then, it's in German but you can put it through DeepL and I highly recommend the read, regardless of how you feel about the miniseries: https://taz.de/Unsere-Muetter-unsere-Vaeter/!5070893/ ("Nazis are always the others" – yes there are some evil German Nazis of course, the cliché ones, the commanding officers, the Gestapo guy and so on but we are not invited to identify with them, we are not invited to consider them part of our ancestry and we are also not invited to consider that most Germans at the time were not victims of circumstance but active participants in the system, unless we're talking about resistance groups which were obviously the exception and not what the miniseries posits as the core 'generation' – one who, we might add, would've been exactly the one to have gone through the whole youth indoctrination unlike older people at the time). So yeah there's a lot to unpack there in terms of how German remembrance culture works and I'll leave it at that, it's a huge topic that would need its own essay. The miniseries is 'fine' TV but it has a certain role in cultural memory production that is, at the very least, questionable and should be considered with some critical distance from its qualities as a drama.

2) There's another issue though and that's more what I was referring to. Basically Volker Bruch playing a Wehrmacht soldier in that miniseries gained him quite a following of wehraboos and in some cases straight up Neonazis. For the longest time, whenever you were searching for posts about him here on Tumblr, they came from accounts that... man, how do I say this. Okay first of all wehraboos are Wehrmacht stans and I came across a big number of them in this context (and in the context of Volker Bruch fandom specifically) where their tumblrs were all about the aesthetic~ of German Wehrmacht soldiers and I just... to say that I found these blogs disturbing is putting it mildly. Often these were run by young women from countries like the Netherlands, Italy or wherever else in the world and my only explanation for this phenomenon is that they grew up with a very stereotypical view of Germans during WWII = evil, so when they discovered that some of them were young (sometimes handsome) men who were also just regular guys, they took this to mean that everyone had been terribly mistaken to lump in 'regular' soldiers with the SS and so they ran in the other direction. I mean, obviously there are distinctions to be made. But the Wehrmacht was also heavily involved in war crimes, so. All that teenage fawning over black and white pictures of real people who may have been involved in real atrocities... well. But that was still comparatively mild. When I first made Babylon Berlin gifs (before it was shown in the US on Netflix, before I made this sideblog, before there was a sizeable interest in these gifs aside from Volker Bruch stans), the accounts that reblogged them... I mean, there were actual Neonazi accounts among those. One I will never forget. Back then I still looked at reblogs to see if people had some commentary in the tags and so I opened this one blog and it was dedicated to Reinhard Heydrich, the "Butcher of Prague". On the front page, there were reblogs of Hitler gifs. Hitler greeting some kids, people doing the Nazi salute. The rest I've blocked from my memory. I had accidentally stumbled across a corner of Tumblr that was entirely sinister. I felt so sick. I ended up blocking and reporting it but this hellsite never gave me a reply so who even knows if anything happened.

So long story short: Ever since then I've resented the fact that Volker Bruch being in Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter gained him Neonazi followers (also tells you something about the miniseries, doesn't it) and I also resented that me just wanting to make Babylon Berlin gifs meant I had to see this stuff. So I stopped making any BB gifs (or at least any containing him) for a while and it's also the reason I never made many gifs of Gereon unless requested. I don't want to say that I feel vindicated after finding out that Volker Bruch is a complete idiot because I never paid much attention to him personally but I was also never his biggest fan, I find his acting range limited, he has a certain vibe and look that goes well with certain period dramas (actually only 20th century ones because he looked rough in the Goethe movie... I actually much prefer Alexander Fehling as an actor but that's neither here nor there). Anyway, there you go.