Ken Burns' Mega-Documentary The War Comes to German Television

I have to confess that like most Americans I am a sucker for Ken Burns' films. The soothing voice of the omniscient narrator, the zooming and panning across still photographs with the plaintive piano or violin as the background music - the frank sentimentality of the narrative - lulls me into a sense of shared national heritage. It is a pleasant place to be, even though historians find the absence of context and analysis appalling.  For a nation that suffers from historical amnesia, the non-historian Ken Burns is the closest thing we have to a national historian.

What is good about a Burns film is that he goes to original sources and shows history "from the bottom up".  This was particularly effective in his Civil War documentary, as the narrator read from (remarkably eloquent) letters from soldiers and their families.  What was also admirable about that documentary was the acknowledgment of shared sacrifice on both sides of the conflict: at no point did Burns vilify the Confederacy.

Unfortunately this balance is totally missing from The War, which is a frank celebration of the American triumph of good over evil in the Good War. There is zero analysis of the origin of World War II or how America got into it. Rather, war is presented as something that is an immutable aspect of human behavior.  This from the very first episode: the narrator tells us"The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power".  The first episode is titled "The Necessary War", so everything that comes afterward is legitimized.  The firebombing of German cities, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - these aspects of the Good War are not questioned: the destructive brutality (and the film does not shirk from showing this, at least) is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of "The Necessary War". 

Still, The War contains some compelling film footage.  I also thought the focus on the war experience from the perspective of four medium-sized American cities - both on the battlefield and the home front - was effective. Ken Burns also does an excellent job on in conveying the terrible price of war, the pervasiveness of death.  This war was fought before PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) was a known affliction, but it is clear from the letters from the front and the eyewitness accounts of the living survivors that it affected many of the soldiers.

The War will be broadcast on the German TV network ARTE starting this Wednesday for seven consecutive weeks.

I found only one review so far in the German press: Silke Lührman  writes about the  Burns' documentary  in the völkisch weekly Junge Freiheit.  Lührman's tone in her review is predictably sarcastic, but she does have one great line at the end of the piece:

"Geschichte, wie sie Sieger schreiben? Mag sein, aber sicher auch Balsam auf der wunden Seele einer angeschlagenen Supermacht, die demnächst in das sechste Jahr eines unnötigen Krieges geht."(History from the pespective of the victor?  Perhaps, but it (The War) is also a balm for the wounded soul of a beleaguered superpower, which shortly will be entering the sixth year of an unnecessary war.)

You can read my translation of the entire review over at Watching America.

Comments

[Hattie]

I, too, was much taken by Ken Burns' Civil War documentary and remember a lot of it quite well. I'm not so sure I want to watch Burns on the subject of WW II, however.

[antonymous]

The Axis of Hate, as its now known throughout the world, is the "Nazi" of our time. The worst racists and warmongers since Hitler are US-American, English and Israeli.

No one in his right mind would expect anything but stalinist-style lies and propaganda from a "documentary" that can be aired on commercial networks in either of these countries.

[David]

"propaganda from a "documentary" that can be aired on commercial networks "

You are mistaken, my friend. It was aired on public television in the US.