Into the Darkness

We’re sitting in the dark. On the screen, Great Garbo and Erika Mann meet up in 1969 in the Swiss alps and reminisce. What was the deal with Marlene Dietrich and the woman they both had a thing with? When film captured the zeitgeist of a whole era and the Germans had Hollywood and all of America eating out of their hands. And what about Erika Mann’s antifascist cabaret Die Pfeffermühle, which had crowds roaring with laughter while the world descended into darkness? And the censorship after 1933, not just in Germany but also in the USA? Oh – and how well did Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich actually know each other? Who was more daring on the screen? And in life?

Into the Darkness is screwball comedy, melodrama, tragedy and romance all in one: a novel as a film, glamorous and highly political. In sophisticated flashbacks, with pace and timing, it looks at the relationship between literature, film, and power in times of staged realities.