Die Wölfe - a 3 part movie

This is more for the German speaking people among us, although I am sure that this movie is soon to be available with English subtitles. Right now it is available in German under www.zdf.de, if you click on “ZDFMediathek”. I watched it a couple of weeks ago and it is called Die Wölfe. Interestingly, it has the same producer as the cannibal-movie that we have watched, Regina Ziegler. There are three parts to it. Every part is about 90 minutes long and plays in a different decade. In every part, the lives of the same group of friends are displayed. It is very interesting to see these, at first young, people’s lives change along with the development of time. I really enjoyed the way the movie was made, as it was a mixture out of documentary and fiction. There were parts where real pictures of those times were used, which turned the movie temporarily into a black and white mode.
The first part of the movie shows Berlin in 1948. It is very much similar to the Berlin we saw in The Murderers are among us. Everything destroyed; people are having hard times finding food and trying to rebuild the city. Here, a group of fifteen year olds is shown, who have to handle the post-war situation on their own. Most of them have lost their parents or fathers in the war, while one of them Jakob, is a concentration camp survivor with no more family left at all. Six kids over all decide to form some sort of a gang which they call Die Wölfe (the wolves). Because they had either lost their parents, their parents were former Nazis, or their father had not returned from war yet and their mother financed their way through sleeping with US soldiers stationed in Berlin, the six kids decide to become each others family with the motto “Nothing can separate us, not even death”. From then on, they are there for each other, steal together and make their way through the hardest times. Unfortunately, both Jakob and Bernd fall in love with the same girl Lotte, who is clearly more interested in Jakob but then choses Bernd in the end. The first movie ends here, showing an image that ma kes the viewer be certain that even though the friends will still be facing bad times, they are strong enough to face those and will eventually be fine.
The second part of the movie shows the same people’s lives while the wall in Berlin is being build in order to separate the East and the West. Jakob refuses to live in the West, as he says “A state ruled by former Nazis”. He is determined to stay in the East even though he has an affair with Lotte, who is married to Bernd now. Lotte decides that she loves Jakob and runs off to him. However, the rules are becoming stricter and stricter and it is no longer possible to go to the West. Bernd has a business and tries to sneak Lotte, her little brother and Jakob back to the West. However, they get caught and a quite complicated situation arises, which the third part of the movie is based on.
The third part is based after the fall of the wall in 1989. It is a little twisted, yet easy to understand. I do not want to say everything about it, because it is much more fun to just watch it.
All in all I really liked the movie. It had its sad parts but it was also really cool to see the real images. Documentaries are some times a little dull, but this was a good mix of both, fiction and reality. It was interesting to see Germany go through the three significant historical stages and to see how the different age groups were handling those. The movie had its sad parts, but overall the message was hopeful. I would recommend it to anyone interested in German post WWII history.