Das Boot
I was so pleased that the second series of this German broadcast was back on screen.
It’s based on the 1981 film but the series oscillates between the U-boat and La Rochelle, the port where many U-boats were berthed.
The original film did not feature La Rochelle but both series and the film gave a graphic account of life in a tube below the sea.
The compacted, claustrophobic life must have been unbearable but the boats inflicted heavy damage on the merchant convoys and their captains hailed as heroes.
As a parallel plot Simone Strasser (Vicky Krips) is working bothclnadestinley for the Resistance and providing food for a Jewish family in hiding and as translator for a particularly nasty Gestapo officer Forster (Tom Wlaschta) who fancies her but not so much as he lets her die on a hospital table without surgery.
Das Boot certainly does not glamourise the life, politics , rivalries and lewd behaviour of the crew but tells it how it was.
It’s a little sad that, whilst our TV companies still produce costume drama reflecting the class struggle, German TV will engage issues uncomfortable to them which happened less than a hundred years ago.
