Hilmes:Ein Ende und ein Anfang. Wie der

Summer 1945: Nothing is as it was. In the four months from May to September 1945, the old world collapses, and a new one emerges. The criminal Third Reich has come to an end, and a time of freedom, but also of new conflicts, begins. How do people experience this summer - victors and vanquished, victims and perpetrators, celebrities and unknowns? The Big Three determine the course of history at the Potsdam Conference, while the Berlin housewife Else Tietze fears for her son's life. The US soldier Klaus Mann tracks down Nazi criminals, and in Berlin, Billy Wilder plans a comedy about life in the ruins. Cafés and restaurants open their doors, and the Red Army soldier Wassili Petrowitsch is begged for bread by German children. In many stories and scenes that lead from Berlin to Tokyo, from Munich to Paris, or from Bayreuth to Moscow, Oliver Hilmes captures the unique atmosphere of this time of extremes: the great happiness and hope of the liberated, the misery and sorrow, the fears of the defeated, and the new freedom. A compellingly narrated panorama of history, a portrait of the year 1945 like never before. Unabridged reading on 1 mp3-CD.