In the Ruins of Berlin

Available for over a year

Historian Karin Wieland examines how the creation of 'In the Ruins of Berlin' took Dietrich unwillingly back to a Fatherland she had categorically rejected with the coming of the Nazis and which would remained profoundly ambivalent, even hostile to her years after the war. Written for the 1948 film A Foreign Affair, Billy Wilder's acid yet bittersweet romcom, set amid the rubble of a defeated nation. Both Wilder and Dietrich had fled Germany, Wilder losing many of his family in the death camps. Both their lives there had been effectively wiped away. Dietrich had initially balked at taking on the role of a former Nazi chanteuse and it required all of Wilder's skills to persuade her even though she faced a deeply uncertain postwar future- much like her rejected nation. Her later tour of West Germany would reveal the depths of that fractured relationship. Writer: Karin Wieland Reader: Julia Fahrenkamp Producer: Mark Burman