Films & Series TV Series: NSU-German History X

Angela

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http://www.betafilm.com/nsugermanhistoryx

"In the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain a clandestine far-right German terrorist group called National Socialist Underground or NSU began operating in Germany by killing immigrants in cold blood, termed the Bosphorus Serial Murders. The victims are brutally slayed with the same gun. The police never even consider a right-wing conspiracy – despite evidence to the contrary – and focus on internal ethnic feuds. So while these decent people are dying, the German authorities are heaping scorn on them, accusing them of drug dealing and hinting at loose morals. Hovering above them are three comrades who've been arrested and let go time and time again: Beate, Böhni and Uwe."

It's very well made and acted, but an ultimately deeply troubling and depressing piece of work. I think what got me the most was the utter vapidity, imbecility, and amorality of these young people, their total disrespect for their parents, and, despite their affirmations,total lack of respect for, or even knowledge of, their own culture, history, religion etc.

They're just alienated, drug-addled young people with no real, grounded beliefs, who find temporary meaning in their purposeless lives from drugs, indiscriminate sex, and violence against people they have scapegoated as somehow being responsible for their lack of satisfaction with their own lives.

God help the west if these are the people who are its last defenders.

A Breitbart article on it:
http://www.breitbart.com/news/tv-series-maker-says-neo-nazi-killers-are-germanys-is/
 
They're just alienated, drug-addled young people with no real, grounded beliefs, who find temporary meaning in their purposeless lives from drugs, indiscriminate sex, and violence against people they have scapegoated as somehow being responsible for their lack of satisfaction with their own lives.

So...teenagers? :p
 
So...teenagers? :p

I'm not quite sure what you mean. There are a lot of teenagers with whom I'm acquainted who are bright, study hard and do well at school, play a lot of sports, sing in the school choir, and sometimes their church choir, do volunteer work etc. and even treat their parents with a reasonable amount of respect. :) They don't have time to get into too much trouble.

These are teen-agers from a particular segment of society, in most cases the working class or lower middle class. Of course, weren't those the classes that propelled the Nazis into power? If the way they were depicted is accurate, they weren't good in school, they don't seem to have been very athletic, they certainly weren't religious, and there didn't seem to be any sense of family cohesiveness.

I'm not saying all teenagers in their towns were like them; I certainly hope not. Nor am I saying we don't have some teenagers here like that, either.

Perhaps the biggest difference is the amount of tolerance for that set of ideas? Again, I'm not saying there aren't some racist teenagers here, but usually they're a one off...a kid with obvious and long standing mental health issues who snaps, using ideology or terminology from the web. This struck me as different: the ideology wasn't as "foreign", there were whole groups of these kids, there were also networks which could provide support, networks not just of teens, but of adults, and there were too many times when they were in the frame but the police felt there just wasn't enough evidence, or it seemed like they were always one step ahead of the police, as if they had some inside information. It just didn't seem plausible that the authorities were this stupid and incompetent or even just latently racist.

If you get a chance to watch it, let me know what you think.
 
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I was just being silly.

I've added it to my queue; expect my impressions in the next week or so. :)
 
this is a NSU

NSU_Prinz_30_%28Audi_Forum_Neckarsulm%29.jpg
 
So I'm done with the first part, and all I can think through the entire thing is that it could have just as easily been called "Young People Behaving Badly: Deutsch Ausgabe." Regardless of their political aims and beliefs or whether one agrees with them, the signal to noise ratio in their lives is highly skewed. So much idiocy and misdirected wastefulness.

I strongly disagree that Uwe Mundlos, at least, could properly be described as "alienated, drug-addled, with no real, grounded beliefs, etc." He seems like a true believer, and neither unintelligent nor ungrounded. Unlike his convict friend and his (as we might say in America) white trash friend Beate, he had every opportunity to make his way in modern government service and chose to hold to his beliefs.

This opinion may change, obviously, as the series continues. :p And just as obviously, I'm speaking of the screen presentation of Herr Mundlos, having never met the man in real life or kept up with the events that inspired this work.
 
The third installment was the most interesting, to me (the second was forgettable, honestly).

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Stop reading if you plan to watch and are unfamiliar with the story, like I was. :)

The sheer hubris of the police/intelligence services in thinking they could "control" the pro-white nationalist groups was astounding. There was almost a good idea there in "at least we kinda know what they're doing this way," but how much good did that really do? Was letting them get away with, essentially, random murders considered an acceptable price for keeping an eye on them? I watched it without subtitles, and my German isn't as good as my English, so I might have missed something, but I can only imagine how such a revelation damaged the families of the victims. I would be absolutely outraged if my father or uncle or whatever was considered an acceptable loss just to say "oh, yeah, we've totally got these people under, uh, passive surveillance...it's really important!"
 
The third installment was the most interesting, to me (the second was forgettable, honestly).

S
P
O
I
L
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R
S

Stop reading if you plan to watch and are unfamiliar with the story, like I was. :)

The sheer hubris of the police/intelligence services in thinking they could "control" the pro-white nationalist groups was astounding. There was almost a good idea there in "at least we kinda know what they're doing this way," but how much good did that really do? Was letting them get away with, essentially, random murders considered an acceptable price for keeping an eye on them? I watched it without subtitles, and my German isn't as good as my English, so I might have missed something, but I can only imagine how such a revelation damaged the families of the victims. I would be absolutely outraged if my father or uncle or whatever was considered an acceptable loss just to say "oh, yeah, we've totally got these people under, uh, passive surveillance...it's really important!"

That's how I felt as well. I can't believe there wasn't more of an uproar over this. The responsible parties had the blood of these people on their hands.

I also wonder whether that was the extent of it. Was it really that they were keeping hands off, or was it for some tacit approval or even support?

The moral bankruptcy of stonewalling these victims' families when they knew the score was breathtaking to me in its scale.

I didn't react that way to the second segment at all. For one thing, it was such a welcome relief to spend time with people like them compared to the totally detestable members of these white supremacist groups and even what we could deduce about their social context, particularly their family structures. I have to confess to skipping around somewhat toward the end of the first segment because I found them and their lifestyle so repugnant that I could barely watch it. Talk about depressing.

For another, just in terms of the program, if you don't empathize with the victims you can't appreciate the scale of the betrayal by the authorities.
 
I also wonder whether that was the extent of it. Was it really that they were keeping hands off, or was it for some tacit approval or even support?

I suspect that the producers of the program might have had to be a bit careful in going that far, considering the lack of evidence involved. It's one thing to depict a rather botched intelligence plan, but another to accuse people who might still work in the field of collaboration with terrorists.

For another, just in terms of the program, if you don't empathize with the victims you can't appreciate the scale of the betrayal by the authorities.

Oh, certainly. If they had skipped from the first part directly to the third, it would have changed the tenor of the entire thing, IMO. The victims would have just been largely faceless names. I just didn't care for the second as much as the first or third.
 

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