[转帖] [Europe] [2013.03.30] The Third Reich revisited 重访第三帝国

showcraft

http://www.ecocn.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=183111
The Third Reich revisited
重访第三帝国

The war generation
经历战争的一代

A new television drama about wartime Germany stirs up controversy
一部关于战时德国的新电视剧引发了争论

Mar 30th 2013 | BERLIN |From the print edition




Fighting a losing war
为即将失败的战争而战斗

GERMAN television viewers are used to frequent programmes exploring the Nazi era and the second world war. But rarely has such a programme triggered as much debate and interest as the screening in mid-March of a three-part drama, “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” (Our Mothers, Our Fathers), which tracks the lives of five young German friends from 1941 to 1945.

德国的电视上播出经常探索纳粹时代和二战的节目，观众对此已经习以为常。三月中旬上影的一部三段式迷你剧《我们的母亲，我们的父亲》讲述了德国五个年轻的朋友在1941年至1945年的经历，这部电影引起了人们的浓厚兴趣，也引发了激烈的争论，这在德国不多见。

The fictional drama, based on scrupulous research, had on average 7.6m viewers per night. Suddenly the few survivors of Germany’s wartime generation are being sought out as never before by talk shows and newspapers. Grandfathers and grandmothers, who for years kept silent, or were never asked, are facing questions about how it could happen, what it was like and whether they saw atrocities. Some more painful questions about who committed what atrocity are resurfacing, too.

据保守调查，每天晚上有七百六十万人观看这部虚构的影片。突然之间，访谈节目和报纸都在寻找德国为数不多的战争幸存者，以前还没有出现过这种事情。长年保持沉默或者从未被询问的祖父祖母们面要回答很多问题：战争如何爆发的？战争是什么样子？见过暴行没有？谁是施暴者？实施了什么暴行？这些更为痛苦的问题又冒了出来。

Nearly 70 years after the end of the Third Reich, Germans feel compelled to keep their country’s Nazi history alive. “It’s not about guilt any more, but it is about collective responsibility,” says Arnd Bauerkämper, professor of history and cultural studies at the Free University in Berlin. The suspicion, however irrational, says Der Spiegel, a weekly, is that the German people are a special case, a historical outlier, who are unsure of themselves and must time and again seek reassurance. “It’s never over,” read a headline for an interview with Nico Hofmann, producer of the series, and a bunch of young Germans in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a daily.

现在距第三帝国的崩溃将近70年了，德国人认为理应将纳粹时期的历史鲜活的保存下来。柏林自由大学研究历史和文化的教授Arnd Bauerkämper说：“这不是内疚，而是集体责任。”明镜周刊论述说：“有人怀疑（不管这种怀疑多么荒谬）德国人是特例，是没有自信的历史局外人，他们必须抓住时机再次寻找自信。”法兰克福汇报采访了这部电影的制片人尼可•霍夫曼和一群德国年轻人，用的标题是“一切还没有结束”。

Films such as “Schindler’s List”, “Holocaust”, an American television series, and the German-made “Downfall”, which tracks Hitler’s final days, all caused passing sensations in Germany. Yet they did not prompt the same intergenerational questioning. “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” has reminded the public that this is their last chance to talk to survivors.

这类电影，如美国的《辛德勒名单》、《大屠杀》，追溯希特勒末日的德国影片《帝国的毁灭》都曾在德国造成轰动。这些电影都没有让两代德国人同时发问。《我们的母亲，我们的父亲》提示公众这是他们和幸存者对话的最后机会。

It seems the actual atrocities were committed by others, not those who are prepared to speak today. Ninety-year-olds now talk of “seeing villages burned” or of how they escaped firing-squad duty. What comes across strongly from these accounts is that after 1943 most intelligent Germans accepted that the war was lost. If they fought on it was out of desperation or camaraderie. Dieter Wellershoff, a writer, interviewed on a popular talk show, said he volunteered for the Hermann Göring tank regiment in 1943 aged 18, after the German defeats in Stalingrad and north Africa, knowing that he was joining a losing war.

好像那些真实的暴行是其他人干的，那些准备今天发言的人没有参与。现在九十岁的老人们谈论“看见村庄在燃烧”，或者谈论他们如何逃避了行刑队的职责。这说明了1943年之后大部分明智的德国人都接受战争会输。如果他们继续战斗，就是因陷入绝望而战，或者是出于友情而战。作家Dieter Wellershoff在一个受欢迎的访谈节目中说，1943年他志愿加入赫尔曼•戈林坦克团，那时他18岁，德国在斯大林格勒和北非吃了败仗之后，他知道自己参加了一场注定失败的战争。

All five characters in Mr Hofmann’s film reach that conclusion early on. They are swept along like corks in an ocean. The atrocities two of them commit as soldiers—one executes a Soviet commissar, the other a Jewish girl—seem to come from their circumstances: obey or die. The real war criminals are the others who exult in killing or intellectualise it. That has prompted some critics to suggest that putting five sympathetic young protagonists into a harrowing story just offers the war generation a fresh bunch of excuses. It’s never over.

霍夫曼电影中的五个角色都在早期知道自己的命运。他们像海洋里的浮子一样四散飘零。其中两个人当了兵，犯下暴行，一个处决了一名苏军政委，另一个处死了一个犹太姑娘——除了服从和死亡，好像他们没有其他选择。真正的战犯是那些热衷杀戮或者给杀戮赋予理智的人。一些评论家得到提示，他们认为将五个有同情心的年轻主角融入这个悲惨的故事只是给了经历战争的那代人一堆新鲜的理由。一切还没有结束。