The Adventures of Werner Holt

Adaptation of an autobiographical novel by Dieter Noll which sets out to tell it like it was for a young man growing up in Nazi Germany. Painstakingly worthy but excruciatingly long, and hopelessly naive in its characterisation of a hero symbolically torn since childhood between two friends, one who enjoys beating people up, the other preferring such weedy intellectual pursuits as piano-playing. Small surprise when, at long last, our hero wakes up to the truth about concentration camps while serving on the Eastern front, and becomes disaffected from Nazism.