On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we hear survivors’ stories, but it’s important to remember that there was a time when many who went through this tragedy stayed silent, often keeping their pasts secret for their entire lives.
The focus of the gripping new series from Yes, The German, which premiered on Monday night on Yes Drama and is also available on Yes VOD and Sting+, is a survivor who refuses to say a word about his experiences and is eventually drawn into helping the Mossad catch the sadistic war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele.
The German’s screenwriters Moshe Zonder (Fauda, Tehran) and Ronit Weiss Berkowitz (The Girl From Oslo, A Touch Away) won the award for Best Writing in the International Competition at Series Mania, one of the most prestigious television festivals in the world, last month. They created the series with Assaf Gil.
The German opens in 1970, and in addition to its emotional story and espionage plotline, it paints a compelling portrait of a kibbutz in that period, with all kinds of well-observed details that create an interesting atmosphere.
Uri (Oliver Masucci), originally from Germany, settled on a kibbutz near the Kinneret following the war and has raised a family with his wife, Anna (Ania Bukstein), who hid during the war and whose family perished. Uri is happy on the kibbutz, engineering a new water purification technique which has caught the interest of a German company, that wants to invest in it. But when Rafi (Rotem Keinan), one of the kibbutz leaders, asks Uri to travel to Munich to seal the deal, he is reluctant at first. He doesn’t mind being polite to German executives who visit the kibbutz to see the product, but he doesn’t want to be back in that country again.
He refuses to talk even to Anna about what he went through and discourages her very firmly from talking about the war to their son, Eitan (Ido Tako), who is in the air force, and their daughter, Tamar (Naya Bienstock), a graduate student interested in post-trauma. When Anna is considering visiting Yad Vashem with her friend, Telma (Sarit Vino-Elad), to find information about the fate of her family, Uri is furious with her, and his anger seems disproportionate.
There are also storylines involving Uri and Anna’s children. Eitan is a sweet guy who spends his time on the kibbutz partying with German volunteers. Tamar is drawn to an American professor, Steven Milk (Dan Shaked), who is researching Holocaust trauma in Israel and whom she invites to the kibbutz to interview survivors there. Uri is less than thrilled with her interest in this subject and won’t speak to the professor.
Pushed by Rafi, Uri heads to Germany for meetings with the executives, but through a complex series of events, it turns out that a Mossad commander (Alon Aboutboul) has his eye on Uri, believing that he has the skills and the personality to hunt down the notorious Dr. Mengele. This hunt will involve him joining a secret society of aging Nazis who dream of taking over Germany again, and he must be able to convince them that he is a gentile.
There’s also a separate storyline reminiscent of Your Honor, another series that premiered on Yes a few years ago and which was eventually remade in the United States with Bryan Cranston.
Don't get spoiled, just watch it
It’s difficult to say more about this series without revealing spoilers, but there is a huge twist at the heart of The German. It’s teased in the first episode and fleshed out a little in the next two episodes that were released to the press and adds much more psychological complexity to the character of Uri.
Uri is portrayed with great intensity by Oliver Masucci, who is best known outside of Germany for his performances in the Netflix supernatural thriller, Dark, and the adaptation of the Stefan Zweig novel, Chess Story, in which he plays a man imprisoned by the Nazis for years, who manages to keep his sanity by playing chess.
There’s a nice balance between all the sides of kibbutz life that are shown, which include evenings of folk dancing, rivalry between the local girls and the glamorous blonde volunteers, and actual scenes of kibbutz members working in the dairy and the fields. These moments made me realize that many fictional depictions of kibbutz life tend to focus on the personal dramas and rarely show the reality of the backbreaking work required to run a collective settlement.
The cast features many of Israel’s top actors, all of whom do excellent work here. Ania Bukstein, whose breakout role was as a brainy ultra-Orthodox girl who falls in love with her roommate in Avi Nesher’s The Secrets and who has gone on to appear in such series as False Flag, even had a small role in Game of Thrones. Recently, she was played a seemingly cold wife in The Other Widow, and she’s good at conveying the confusion of a wife who discovers she doesn’t know her husband as well as she thought. Ido Tako is Israel’s newest young star, who had a key role in Tom Nesher’s Come Closer and starred in The Vanishing Soldier as a soldier who runs away from a war in Gaza. International audiences will recognize him from his role as Joseph in the Netflix movie, Mary. Sarit Vino-Elad, an extremely versatile actress, can currently be seen in the movie, Real Estate: A Love Story.
There’s a lot going on in The German, but the characters are distinctive enough and the plotting is carefully thought out, so it never becomes confusing or rushed. Perhaps the best thing I can say about the series is that I binged all three episodes and am looking forward to more.