How far do we want to go?

She can understand what her sister is doing. She would never do it, she stands on the other side of a thin line. If she could, Anna would conjure up a world somewhere where Benni wouldn't do what she feels compelled to do.

There was a time, not so long ago in the new Paramount series "A Thin Line", when there was no thread between the twin sisters Anna and Benni. What then happened between them is happening in probably many climate rescue groups. Anna and Benni are the Jin and Jang of activism. They have to decide how far they want to go to perhaps only supposedly save the world.

German series on Amazon, Netflix

"A Thin Line", Paramount's second German miniseries, produced by the Weydemann brothers, who already produced Nora Fingscheidt's Oscar nominee "Systemsprenger" and Sabrina Sarabi's provincial puberty drama "No one is with the calves", does everything very differently.

In just under five hours and following the stories of just over half a dozen characters, the sequel follows the front line of one of the central debates of the present day. And a generation that sees itself as the last. It looks dirty, direct and unembellished. There is no trace of Netflix-like smoothness.

"I don't want us to die from the heat," says Anna. "I don't want there to be fights over food and water. But if we don't do anything, all this will happen. What do we do now?"

Stefanie Ren said that she didn't actually want to write a climate catastrophe film. She is the lead writer of "A thin line". It's a story about what pressure from outside and inner turmoil does to climate activists, what drives them to do everything they expose themselves to, to which they are exposed.

A story about what you can and can't do. A story full of moral grayscale.

Anna and Benni are climate.leaks. With the hubris of all do-gooders, the twins, who could hardly be more different, publish material from a typical Berlin workspace slob against what they see as the true climate terrorists. So against people who sin against the environment for base motives.

Against the transport minister, for example. He wants to flatten a grove for a highway. He has no idea that this little forest is the adventure playground where Anna and Benni grew up and where their foster mother has lived in a hippie-esque windmill idyll since the environmentally conscious eighties.

The grove is the Lützerath of "A Thin Line". The vanishing point of the twins, the concreteness of a climate catastrophe, which only provides the background, the trigger for the hexalogy that Sabrina Sarabi and Damian John Harper shot.

Anna and Benni couldn't be more different. Anna is the hacking genius of the two, the down-to-earth, the realistic one. Anxiety almost blurs her contours, her eyes seem to be constantly being pursued. Saskia Rosendahl makes the fragility of this girl almost physically tangible.

Benni is the physical one, she kicks out in all directions, gradually pushing herself up the escalation ladder. Hanna Hilsdorf is applying for the next Gudrun Ensslin with the way she makes Benni's radicalization physical.

"A Thin Line" is also the bee dance of two people who don't want to let go of the thinning threads that connect them, who can't get rid of each other, but have to learn it. A breakup story.

The fact that the biographies of the characters justify their actions, the extent to which the private becomes political here, does not dilute their commitment, it deepens it, making the story inevitable. Through the burning glass of a family history, a section of the dense web of present-day Germany becomes empathetically and precisely visible.

Despite all the obvious debate dramatization and exaggeration, the six-part series never loses sight of the genre to which it actually owes itself. "A Thin Line" is a classic spy thriller.

Benni (controlled by Anna on the laptop in the best "Mission Impossible" manner) breaks into the Minister of Transport and steals incriminating data material. You upload it to climate.leaks. Then heavily armored police officers stand in front of the door.

Benni flees, Anna goes to prison. Her uncle Christoph (Peter Kurth) - he heads the cyber crime unit of the BKA - makes her an informant. Benni disappears into a violent climate terror group that calls itself "Last Standing". “A Thin Line” is also a near-future story. To be continued. Hopefully.