When World War II breaks out on September 1, 1939, the world finds itself on the brink. Six people from different countries and walks of life, whose lives and destinies touch the nexus of power, have to decide: What do they want to fight for? The series follows them into the 1960s, from the war to a world fully divided.

Protagonists

German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun wants to conquer space. To make his dream possible, he puts himself in service of the National Socialists, who expect him to create a miracle weapon for the German army. In Los Alamos, New Mexico, the young physicist Joan Hinton is also active in the fight for military supremacy, as one of the few women on Robert Oppenheimer’s team working on the first atomic bomb.

Hedwig Hoess is an ardent Nazi as well as proud mother. Her husband Rudolf has just been appointed Commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. There in occupied Poland, right next to hell, Hedwig strives to build a paradise for her children. In British Mandate Palestine, Golda Meir fights by any means necessary to save Jewish refugees who escaped the Nazis, as she nurtures the hope for a new, independent Jewish state: Israel.

From the French colony of Martinique, Frantz Fanon takes up the fight against the Germanss, volunteering for military service at age 17. As a black man, he experiences the daily toll of racism in the French army. When the war ends, Frantz goes underground to help liberate Algeria from French colonial control.

In the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev is part of the Communist power structure.  Confronted with the invasion of Kiev by the German Wehrmacht and at the same time personally targeted by Stalin’s terror, he has to decide where his loyalties lie: his family or the Soviet dictator.

About the series

As these parallel narratives unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that different dreams and struggles affect each other. World War II leaves the world in ruins, with the discovery of atomic fission cementing its division. But the struggle for post-war supremacy has only just begun.

Between love and betrayal, hope and fear, power and despair, all six make their way into a new era – under the shadow of new conflicts in an ever more deeply divided world. Radically subjective, highly emotional and told from multiple-perspectives, A WORLD DIVIDED forges a new transnational narrative from the history we thought we knew.

Press booklet (PDF)