of wine behind the bar and pours them each a drink. “Gut, das du lebst” (It is good that you live), he says, and they stand and drink a toast to their absent friends.

The series has received widespread acclaim in Germany, winning all three of the Deutscher Fernsehpreis, the Bayerischer Fernsehpreis and the Prix Europa for 2013, and critics have praised it as a milestone in Germany’s reckoning with its troubled past. There has been criticism from Russian and Polish sources, unhappy with the portrayal of Russian soldiers shooting the injured as they over-ran the German field hospital and raping the German nurses, and with the portrayal of the Polish partisans as anti-Jewish, but these portrayals are now widely accepted as historically accurate.

Jewish groups have predictably accused thehis family positively, recounting that Viktor’s father had fought for Germany during World War One, and depicting Viktor as a courageous and good-hearted individual. There are no dislikable Jewish characters portrayed in the series, the other prominent Jewish character, Lilija is also depicted as a strong, well educated and forgiving individual and the series avoids the equally thorny issue of attempting to explain why the Nazis felt such great antipathy towards Jews.

Lastly, the series ends without portraying the initially genocidal regime imposed upon the conquered German people by the victorious Allies. Independently sourced population statistics indicate that German wartime losses and losses during the immediate post-war period were massive as a result, dwarfing those of most comparably sized nations.

After the German surrender, the Allies imposed a regime under