ROSENSTRASSE Made in Germany

Jewish husbands of Aryan wives were protected from deportation to concentration camps and the near-certain death sentences that awaited them. However, during the ” final roundup” of mid-winter 1943, many of these protected Jews were suddenly taken to a detention center on the Rosenstrasse, a street in Berlin.

We start in present-day New York, where middle-aged Ruth is sitting shiva for her recently departed husband. Ruth’s daughter, Hannah, watches as her mother goes through some extraordinary changes. The arrival of a distant cousin provokes the perplexed Hannah to try to uncover her mother’s past, long kept as a dark secret from her. She travels to Berlin and what she discovers there reveals the amazing truth about the years Ruth spent as a child in war-torn Germany.

The film not only deals with the awful realities of the period, but also manages to create a story that finds hope and life a mid horror and death. In telling this compelling tale with compassion and sympathy, Margarethe von Trotta has produced another film of grand stature.