Six episodes of “In Europa” are now available with English subtitles, so we can finally make at least part of the series available for an English speaking audience.
What is “In Europa”? Watch this video (3 min.):
Or click on the episodes below to watch them on this website:
1900 - Dawn of the Century (English subtitles):
The turn of the century brought promises of unfathomable progress. New machines, new techniques, new ideas all seemed to clear the way for a new society and a new world. But before long, it became clear that the new era would bring all kinds of new and unexpected challenges along with it. In the first episode, viewers are given a preview of what’s to come in the rest of the series.
1914 - Vienna & Sarajavo (English subtitles):
The First World War brought to a definitive end any of the optimism with which the century began. On June 28, a Serbian farmer’s son by the name of Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Six weeks later, war was declared. In Vienna, we meet the grandson of the murdered Franz-Ferdinand. In Sarajevo, still recovering from its most recent war, we meet Mile Princip, the assassin’s great-nephew. Depending on the way the winds of politics are blowing, his great-uncle alternates from being regarded as a hero to as a terrorist.
1915 - Ypres, Belgium (English subtitles):
The war of 1914 was supposed to be a simple affair, to be over by Christmas. Unfortunately, it proved to be a different, new kind of war. Trench warfare was perfected as both sides tore open the fields of Flanders and France with an ever growing arsenal of destruction. Poisonous gasses and flamethrowers were introduced to tip the balance. In West Flanders, a truck still makes daily runs to collect unexploded ammo: 250,000 kilos a year. For some, this violence proved to be too much and they went crazy with fear: shellshock. Soldiers who lost their nerve were shot. To this day, grandchildren are trying to rehabilitate their grandfathers’ names.
1916 - The Somme (English subtitles):
The First World War proved to be a fertile breeding ground for technology. New inventions like the tank were introduced to inflict more damage and win battles, while in surgery and medicine new ways were found to repair those damaged. The thousands of severely mutilated soldiers, the men without a face, were given new noses, ears and jaws thanks to the tender beginnings of plastic surgery. On the home front, film footage shows the horrors of the real war as large as life on the big screen to those who stayed behind. Not only the soldiers, but all of society was traumatized: when an orphaned soldier wandered around not knowing where he was and his photo appeared in the paper, hundreds of mothers, children and girlfriends came forward to claim them as their own husband, friend or father.
1929 - Berlin (English subtitles):
After his release from the Tegel Prison in Berlin, where he was serving a sentence for the murder of his girlfriend Ida, Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist in the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, starts to panic. The new Berlin grabs him by the throat. The city is adrift; it’s decadent, frivolous and lawless. Berlin was the cultural center of Europe and many artists from around the world flocked there. In the meantime, the rumblings of one of the greatest disasters that a European country has ever brought upon itself were resonating from below. The city was dancing on the volcano. Hitler and his followers were warming up for their rise to power four years later. Nowadays, the city has rediscovered its position as a European cultural center.
1942 - Germany (English subtitles):
From behind the drawing boards of the furnace manufacturers Topf & Söhne, the engineers could look out the window and see the smoke rising from the chimneys of camp Buchenwald. That smoke came from cremation furnaces that they had designed, and similar furnaces manufactured by them also burned bodies at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Were you a collaborator if you worked for Topf & Söhne? Should you have refused to service the furnaces at Auschwitz? Did you talk about what you saw at home at the dinner table? There’s only one question that remains after this episode and one that will never be answered: What would you have done back then?
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