"Krieg und Frieden" is a collection of films and documentary material by different directors on various aspects of war. It is mostly very boring, so that I have only summarized the short sequence, in which Jürgen has an appearance. This sequence was written, by the way, by a well-known German author, Heinrich Boell. At that time in Germany, no halfway intellectual film-director would dream of entertaining the audience, a film had to be educational. For some reason, it seemed to be impossible to combine both purposes: if a film was entertaining, or even funny, it couldn't possibly be intelligent or politically correct, your name was mud, if you tried it. Some directors seem to have concluded from this, that vice versa, "boring" must equal "intellectual"!
This film collection was produced at the height of the Cold War, so the extremely gloomy vision of the world and the future was not artificial but mirrored a fear, that was really there among people aware of politics. And you couldn't help noticing, that the eastern half of Germany was part of the Eastern Block and full of Russian troops.
If you have the patience to get there, the most interesting snippets in this collection are the old news reels about the G7 meeting (or whatever this was called at the time) in Versaille, starring our old chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Ronald Reagan and a still youthful Mrs. Thatcher, or the material about the Russian rockets.
Reel 2, Gespraeche im Weltall
A well known situation: a spaceship in orbit, on board two American
astronauts, one of them Jürgen. There are no more signals from Earth and
they have to assume, that they are the only ones left after some terrible
nuclear war.. Suddenly they get a signal after all: it comes from a Russian
spaceship with two cosmonauts. They are asking "Is there anybody alive
anymore?" In the conversation that starts, the two parties show, that
they still think along the old lines, unchanged by what happened. They ask
each other "Who won?" and both parties think, that they did.
"Are you real communists?"
"Yes, and what are you?"
"We are Christians."
"We were told to cross ourselves, if we met Christians."
They look all out of their windows and describe to each other, what destruction they can see down there. For a moment it looks, as if they are going to find a common ground, their dead families. The Russians say, that there is a small chance, they can land in Siberia and invite the Americans to come along, if it is technically possible. Juergen wants to go back to earth, no matter where but his colleague would rather die than go to Siberia. Vice versa, one of the Russians thinks death is preferable to California.