Cheers! In the Netflix hit ‘Transatlantic’ resistance against the Nazis is (too) fun

It is 70 to 80 meters long and the main attraction is a stand of Fritten Mafia Berlin. It is one of the smallest, narrowest, most secondary streets on Potsdamer Platz, a worm of a street. It’s called Varian-Fry-Strasse. Varian Fry was a hero. And it was mainly the Varian-Fry-Strasse that has now led to the seven-part Netflix series hit “Transatlantic”.

Because one day the American series developer Anna Winger (“Unorthodox”) was walking with her father on Potsdamer Platz and looking at the street sign, he asked his daughter: “Do you actually know who Varian Fry is?” She didn’t know. And her father told her the story of the young American journalist who, in 1940 and 1941, had helped more than 2,000 Jews from Marseilles flee across the Atlantic.

In 1935, at the age of 28, Fry was working in Berlin as a foreign correspondent for an American magazine, observing the Nazi crimes against the Jews. He wrote about it in the “New York Times” and published several books. in everything a reserved, thoughtful, polite man. In 1940, supported by the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, he was given the task of rescuing European artists, intellectuals and Nobel laureates who were being persecuted in Marseilles. A very elite job that Fry soon gave up in view of the huge crowd of desperate people.

For 13 months, Fry led the Emergency Rescue Committee at Hotel Splendide in Marseille. Hidden refugees first in the hotel and then in the Villa Air-Bel. Acquired false passports and visas, smuggled the people who entrusted his life onto ships or personally drove them to Spain by car.

He was aided by wealthy Chicago heiress Mary Jane Gold, whose family had grown wealthy by inventing and manufacturing railroad heating systems. In 1930, at the age of 21, she emigrated to Paris and spent ten years partying there. She was a pilot, owned her own plane, used it to explore all of Europe and especially enjoyed flying to Switzerland’s most expensive alpine luxury resorts for skiing. She was known for her “wonderfully relaxed, down-to-earth demeanor” and her “warm sense of humour,” as an acquaintance described her.

When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, she gave away her plane to the French Air Force and moved to Marseilles with her dog Dagobert, who is known to bark wildly at the word “Hitler”. There she met Fry. He thinks she’s a stupid, decadent playgirl and she thinks he’s stiff and distant. But he needs her money. And they have a purpose in life.

Austrian communist Lisa Fittko organized the famous escape route to Spain via the Pyrenees – the route on which German philosopher Walter Benjamin committed suicide for fear of being arrested again.

The three of them and their handful of helpers were able to save: the painter Marc Chagall and his wife; the philosopher Hannah Arendt; the writer Anna Seghers; the filmmaker Max Ophuls; the artists Jean Arp, Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst; the artist Sophie Taeuber; the writers Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, André Breton, Walter Mehring; the critic Siegfried Kracauer; the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; the historian Golo Mann; the medicine Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof and many more important names. Or simply: the creative and intellectual elite of their time. None of them have ever publicly thanked Fry, Gold or Fittko.

It was a battle against the Nazis and against the collaborating French police and finally Fry and Gold are expelled from France in September 1941. Until his death in 1967 he continued to work as a publicist and adviser against Nazi Germany and for war refugees. In America he was a very modest hero and suffered increasingly from depression. He dies alone of a cerebral hemorrhage. He and Gold are best friends to the end. Both describe their time together in Marseille as the best of their lives.

After his death, several awards, streets and smaller monuments are dedicated to him, his life is fictionalized in films and novels, and in Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Protocol”, which is now a major part of the “Transatlantic” series. , his hidden life as a gay is discussed for the first time. Conservative Fry fans think this is a disgusting invention, but his son James confirmed it in the New York Times in 2019, saying, “My dad was actually a closet homosexual.”

Mary Jane Gold outlived him by thirty years and made a major contribution to his fame in 1980 with her autobiography “Crossroads Marseilles 1940”. She lives in New York and near Saint-Tropez. Nothing is known about her love life, she is said to have always lived happily alone after a passionate affair with a foreign legionnaire in Marseilles.

Lisa Fittko fled to Cuba in 1941 with her future husband. In 1948, the two moved to Chicago, where she worked as a foreign language correspondent and remained involved in the peace movement. In 2001, she witnessed the erection of a memorial in Banyuls-sur-Mer, where her escape route to Spain had begun. She died in Chicago in 2005.

All in all, it’s an incredibly rich treasure trove of destinies and stories that Anna Winger has rescued for her miniseries, and you have to give her credit for bringing the brave and unruly people, largely unknown to us, into our world. conscience. But Winger could easily have turned it into a bigger series in three seasons. After all, “Transatlantic” is a start, and it’s to be hoped that Netflix audiences have become curious and are once again looking for clues on their own.

“Transatlantic” covers the breathtaking 13 months of the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille. And he wants one thing above all: to entertain, to entertain, to entertain. All the main characters inevitably need juicy love stories, everyone looks incredibly good, they are super beautiful people in super beautiful costumes. An intra-American conflict with a nasty imaginary consul (Corey Stoll) builds, African hotel workers prove to be the most radical resistance fighters, and characters like Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin constantly have to carry the key phrases of their work as pop intellectual calendar statements. The French police are constantly in Louis de Funès mode.

They are all feverish, yes, inspired by their good deeds and therefore in a very good mood. And hey, the festivals should be celebrated here as well, as if you were in the dance palace of «Babylon Berlin», because firstly you are in France, and secondly there really is no better way to show on film how much someone LIVES. Overall, the gravy boat does a good job of imparting colorful health to the candy. This much fun in the Resistance was rare, Marseille is a pure, adrenaline-pumping adventure course. There is a clear commitment here to the trivialization of terror. Operetta instead of opera.

Still, you like to watch this kitschy history lesson, the storytelling style of the two Swiss directors Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond is extremely easy to drink, Gillian Jacobs is a very charming Ms. Gold and Cory Michael Smith is an utterly endearing, fragile Varian Fry, who (like the historical Mr. Fry) can never really get over how many people pin their last hopes on him. The Swiss Deleila Piasko gets disappointingly little playing time as Lisa Fittko, and for the first time people would like to see more of Moritz Bleibtreu (as Walter Benjamin).

By the way, among the performers is also the one with his real name who steals the show anyway: Dagobert, Mary Jane Gold’s historically authenticated dog, for whom a few stunts for the small body were written. His actor in “Transatlantic” listens to neither a French nor an American name. It is named after a dish that really reconciles people – risotto.