Anna Winger's series tells of the rescue of European intellectuals and artists such as Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall from the Nazis. A true story reminiscent of the classic film “Casablanca”.
Crisis talk. A scene from the series “Transatlantic”
In 1940, American journalist Varian Fry was sent to the southern French city of Marseille. He was supposed to help Europeans who had to flee from the Nazis. On behalf of the US Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) and together with the very wealthy heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who supported him financially and logistically, Fry and his team brought over 2000 people to safety.
Among them some of Europe's greatest artists and intellectuals, such as the philosopher Hannah Arendt or the painters Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp – refugees who were later to have a decisive influence on the world of thought in the USA.
Reicher Pool of sources
“It's a great story that has never been told before,” says Berlin-based screenwriter and producer Anna Winger, who adapted the story of Fry and the ErC committee for the streaming provider Netflix into the seven-part series “Transatlantic”. has. “Everyone who experienced it at the time was active as an artist or writer themselves,” says Winger. “They worked that into memoirs, plays, fiction, short stories and novels. So there was a huge pool of sources.”
Winger previously wrote and produced the Emmy Award-winning Netflix series Unorthodox – the story of a Jewess who breaks out of her ultra-orthodox Hasidic environment in Brooklyn, New York and flees to Berlin. In addition, Winger is responsible for the Amazon spy series “Deutschland 83/86/89”, which is told from the point of view of an involuntary East German spy.
Lucas Englander plays Albert Hirschman
Winger learned about Fry and the ERC from her father, who, as a professor at Harvard University, was in contact with the famous economist Albert Hirschman. The German-Jewish refugee, played in the Netflix series by Austrian newcomer Lucas Englander, stayed in Marseille in 1940 to help others escape.
Parallels with the 2015 refugee crisis< /h2>
Winger's idea of telling a story about refugees came later, however: when she experienced the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 at first hand. “My office was at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, and the hangars were the first port of call for the refugees, most of whom came from Syria came. We all worked as volunteers,” she recalls. “My daughter, who was 12 or 13 years old at the time, said: 'You know, these are people like us, with the difference that people like us had to leave Berlin back then. And now people are coming to Berlin to seek protection here find'.”
In 2019, while Winger was working on Unorthodox, writer Julie Orringer brought out The Flight Portfolio, a fictionalized account of the exploits of Fry and the ERC in Marseille. “That was fate,” says Winger. “So I secured the rights to the book and that's how the whole thing started.”
Classic film “Casablanca” for inspiration
Rather than being a docudrama, Anna Winger and her co-writer Daniel Hendler conceived “Transatlantic” as a fictionalized romantic adventure story inspired by the famous Hollywood classic “Casablanca”.
“I have a little something about the I read the origin story of 'Casablanca,' it's one of my favorite films,” says Winger. “Many of those who worked on the film at the time had just emigrated from Germany themselves. And then they suddenly had to deal with the Second World War, the news from home – and channel the whole trauma and tragedy into humor and romance.”
The style of melodramas and screwball comedies (fast dialogue, irreverent humor and eccentric characters characterize them, editor's note) of the 1930s and 40s also characterize the pace and storytelling of “Transatlantic”, which not only from Fry and the ERC, but also tells of a – fictional – romance between Hirschman and Mary Jayne Gold. The latter is played by Gillian Jacobs. In the Netflix series, she is also a British Secret Service spy who helps smuggle English soldiers out of Nazi POW camps.
Shortly after the start of filming on “Transatalantic”, Russia invaded the Ukraine – and again many people in Europe had to flee
Some of the series' strongest scenes are comedic in character. The German actor Alexander Fehling shows a furiously extravagant performance as the extravagant Max Ernst. Jonas Nay (main actor of “Deutschland '83”) makes a guest appearance as the German satirist Walter Mehring and delivers a breathtaking musical cabaret number.
“I think in a way it shows human nature in difficult times,” says Lucas Englander. “It's also the reason why people in Ukraine are so brave in their work and don't just say: 'That's it, we give up.' They say, 'I'm going on and I'm staying, and you can't take my humor away, it's stronger than you'.”
A 'refugee-positive' story
The series shows the dramatic rescue attempts to bring fugitives across the Pyrenees to Spain or in cargo ships, hidden among the cargo to America; at the same time, “Transatlantic” examines the beginning of a broader revolution that is taking place formed.
“Transatlantic” was inspired by the classic film Casablanca
“When France was fighting the Nazis, they got help from the colonies in Africa. When Paris fell, these people were still in the country,” says Winger. “That's when the Résistance (the French resistance movement against the Nazis, editor's note) was born, and many Africans were part of it. And because everything is connected, the Réstistance was also the beginning of the end of the colonial system. Because back then people came together, who otherwise would never have met. That shaped new ideas about freedom.”
These different stories of the search for freedom – Jews trying to free themselves from Nazi terror, African revolutionaries trying to free France from the Liberating the Nazis and, in the end, Africa from France or also Mary Jayne Gold, who is trying to break away from her patriarchal American family – are the unifying force of “Transatlantic”.
“That is a refugee-positive story, quite deliberately. That's not meant to be polemical, but it is nonetheless,” says Winger. “This story is about all those refugees who want to go to America to be free. But at the same time, Americans are finding their personal freedom in war-torn Europe. So everyone is moving towards freedom, and they meet at that crossroads.”
The series “Transatlantic” starts on April 7, 2023 on Netflix.
Adaptation from English: Julia Hitz.