Nevertheless, the German commentator is not taking the argument seriously, instead viewing civil society efforts as being right on course. Poland's conservatives are on a collision course and it is being taken as just that by Germany's conservatives. Whereas Gnauck evidently thinks the time has come for closer cooperation, Gawin criticizes Germany's lone efforts regarding the politics of history and the distortion of historical facts. The two authors appraise the chances for German-Polish communication processes in very different ways. to present themselves as victims of history." At the same time, however, he summarized the reactions to the film in a far more levelheaded manner and views the debate and the recurrent "misunderstandings" about German-Polish history in the twentieth century as a challenge facing both German and Polish societies to try to develop a common picture of a shared history. For this reason as well, the Poland correspondent for Die Welt, Gerhard Gnauck, responded with a similarly vehement charge: "Where the façade frayed off into the absurd, arguments such as this were uttered: The neighbors in the West are making an effort to shift the blame from "the Germans" to "the Nazis", that is, from a collective that continues to exist to a clique that can no longer be held responsible.
The Germans want so much to achieve a different, higher status-that of a people not accused of starting two World Wars and a bloodbath in which it drowned Europe." With this interpretation Gawin does not represent the majority of Poles, but rather the conservative and patriotic circles that traditionally view Germany with mistrust. Gawin did not mince her words: "Today's Germany is in fact pluralistic, peaceful, and is working through its own past with respect to anti-Semitism, militarism, nationalism, and other sins of the past-but preferably those of others. The Germans even tend to portray themselves in the role of victims, she said, and to put the blame on other peoples. She said the film was part of a broad-based policy regarding German history, which aims to exonerate the German nation from its historical responsibility for the Second World War. The Polish journalist Magda Gawin viewed the ZDF production as the expression of a "new German identity". Simultaneously in late June 2013, two major conservative newspapers, the German Die Welt and Polish Rzeczpospolita, published attempts to summarize the most recent German-Polish neighborly dispute over the three-part feature miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (Generation War) shown on ZDF German television ( Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) last spring.