The Winter Garden. A German family in the long 20th Century

The twentieth century was long and was distinctly turbulent in Germany. Wars, revolutions, crises and dictatorships alternated. People fell into deep poverty, became morally corrupted, or lost their lives randomly and senselessly.

Saxon Hilde Grunewald, daughter of a gymnasium teacher, saw it all: she lived to be a hundred years old by a hair’s breadth. Born in the Imperial era, shaped by World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, World War II, the GDR era and the fall of the Wall in 1989. Hilde even lived through the first decade of reunified Germany.

Her fate, and that of her parents, children and grandchildren, reflects German history. From farm workers and day laborers, they rose to become factory directors, castle wardens and bank managers. But soon they found themselves as soldiers on the battlefields, in the conflagration of the bombing of Dresden, in an apartment half confiscated in communist East Germany. And finally among the partying crowd at the Brandenburg Gate when Berlin became one city again.

Based on unique archival material, Jan Konst described the eventful life story of Hilde and her family. The result is an equally penetrating and unforgettable portrait of Germany in the long twentieth century.