The End of Dreams

1939. War breaks out in Europe and starts to spread around the world. Six people from different countries and continents must take their decisions, how to survive in a world, which threatens their families and dreams. Young German engineer Wernher von Braun must set aside his dreams of flying to the moon and start building weapons of war for the Nazis. Meanwhile in the US, the young physicist Joan Hinton starts working on a secret project at Los Alamos, building the first nuclear bomb with Fermi and Oppenheimer. Fascinated by the research and the science, she is devastated when the US actually uses the bombs, dropping them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing many thousands of people. Joan is forced to rethink her whole life. Hedwig Höss, an ardent Nazi, proud mother and wife of Rudolf who has just become commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp, sets about creating a paradise for her kids next door to a veritable hell, while Golda Meir battles to create a new home for all the Jews who have had to flee the destruction of the Nazi regime – in British-ruled Palestine. And she has a dream: an independent state for Jews from all over the world, a true homeland. At the same time, Nikita Khrushchev is torn between family and power under Stalin‘s regime of terror and must decide where his loyalties lie. Meanwhile, shortly before the end of the war, the young Frantz Fanon from Martinique signs up and experiences the end of the war as a black soldier in Europe. Between love and betrayal, hope and fear, power and despair, our six protagonists struggle to realize their dreams. Their decisions have changed our world forever, in very different ways. By linking the fates of these six very different individuals, we bring world history to life; for the first time, we tell the story of the Second World War, the beginning of the Cold War and decolonization from an international perspective and, at the same time, in a radically subjective way. Even though each episode focuses on one protagonist, the stories are interwoven with each other in a horizontal narrative style. In this way, we follow the progress of each of the individuals across several episodes, while, at the same time, embedding their stories in the broader context of world history. We do this by blending the stories of our protagonists, which are filmed like fictional storylines, with original archive material from the period. In this way, we see what they saw, experience these events as they experienced them and immerse ourselves in their world.

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