This version of the Das Boot introduces more female characters into its ensemble, but ultimately only to subject those characters to violence, torture, and rape. The show can at times feel similarly unsure of this question when it comes to its gender politics. “And if it could: would a movie audience really want to experience the whole truth?” And if not, if the only characters left standing have fully given into the awful dictates of their time, then why expect us to invest eight hours of our time with them? This is a concern Buchheim raised about his own story, albeit referring to Petersen’s adaptation: “Can re-playing it give a sense of the horrors of reality?” he wondered in 1981. And at that point, one has to ask: Why tell this story at all? If the idea is that life in occupied France was more complicated than a simple good-and-evil schema, then these people and their actions should be able to genuinely surprise you. The narrative of Das Boot hews so slavishly to convention that one can basically game out the season by the end of episode three or four. War means chaos, but being appointment television on a streaming service means following rules. In moments like this, the messiness and close observation of Buchheim’s novel run headlong into the by now fairly rote rhythms of international prestige TV. Unfortunately, Forster becomes so sympathetic by the end of the four episodes Hulu made available that by the established conventions of prestige TV, a heel turn becomes entirely inevitable. He is a true believer, but far from a cackling villain: an intelligent, even thoughtful, man who has put his gifts into the service of a barbaric system out of profound conviction. Tom Wlaschiha (Jaqen H’gar from Game of Thrones) plays Hagen Forster, the head of the local Gestapo, who starts out the series as a fascinatingly multifaceted screen-Nazi. While U-612 puts out to sea, gets ensnared in international espionage, hits a nasty Atlantic storm and drifts inevitably towards mutiny, back home in La Rochelle the young translator Simone Strasser (Vicky Krieps) gets ensnared in a plot involving the Gestapo, the Résistance and their mysterious leader (Lizzy Caplan). That’s partly because the new show divides its time between the high seas and the town of La Rochelle. The new version follows its source material’s lead by acknowledging the obvious: that the Nazi state and the navy were tightly interwoven, that the work done by the U-boat captains could not be separated from the atrocities being committed on land. In particular, the controversy concerned the head of the German Navy, Admiral Dönitz, who was for eight days after Hitler’s death the new head of Nazi Germany, and who had whitewashed his own record after the war partly through the mythification of the U-boat fleet. Buchheim’s novel caused a massive stir in the 1970s because it thematized the crimes, the guilt, and the pervasive sense of futility among those who had volunteered for service in the U-boat war. The German Kriegsmarine had long been allowed to claim for itself a relatively clean record, and the U-boat fleet in particular was subject to mythification and lionization that had carried over with shocking continuity from Nazi propaganda. The creators of the new version on Hulu returned to the submarine pen, for a send-off of yet another U-boat. When Wolfgang Petersen made his film version of the book in 1981, he used the pen in La Rochelle as his stage, including for the film’s final scene when the U-boat crew arrives in home harbor only to be mostly killed in a surprise Allied bombing raid.

Every few decades, it seems, the German film industry sends a few hundred people in Nazi uniforms to play around in one of these structures. Lothar-Günther Buchheim based his 1973 novel Das Boot on his experiences as a war reporter on several U-boats, and while the novel is fiction, the submarine base in the novel is recognizably the one at Saint-Nazaire.

The structure sits around today relatively unchanged-an enduring monument of World War II, and a convenient backdrop for telling stories about it. Its extreme dimensions and sturdiness-the roof alone is more than 20 feet thick-made it impossible to destroy after the war. Like the ones at Saint-Nazaire and Lorient, its colossal berths, titanic dimensions and worn concrete today give the structure the appearance of a relic of prehistoric times. The submarine pen in La Rochelle, France was built in in 1941.

Das boot based on a true story