Description
At a Dresden hospital in 1945, nurse Anna Mauth (Felicitas Woll) cares for badly injured British pilot Robert Newman (John Light), whom Anna believes to be a German deserter. As Allied forces close in, Anna grows close to Robert despite her engagement to Dr. Alexander Wenninger (Benjamin Sadler).
The two-part film tells about the bombing of Dresden on February 13-15, 1945. The most important leitmotif is the statement that civilians are the first to die in the war. This maxim was put into the mouth of the main character, a nurse from Dresden, who survived the terrible days of the bombing.
Tens of thousands of dead citizens were registered by the city authorities. Deaths on the streets, deaths from bomb fragments, deaths from fires, the terrible fate of those who died in bomb shelters in basement rooms, suffocated from lack of burnt oxygen. It was impossible to count the dead in several places of the city - the remains were insignificant and mixed with ashes.
In the statistics of the beginning of 1945, it was noted that refugees flocked to the city, people who shunned the eastern front of the Red liberators. It is impossible to mention exactly how much the city was replenished in those months - multiple times, judging by the flows of pedestrians, trucks, trains, residents of East Germany. 100-200-300 thousand people who lost their homes, exhausted, and died in a burning city. Later, Kurt Vonnegut will indicate approximately the same figures in his book, but he will be forced to make a reservation that this is fiction.
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The film was shot at the beginning of the 21st century. But even to this day, the Germans do not dare to make German history. The film must necessarily feature a downed English pilot, a brave Air Force bombing night cities, buffoonish nurses drinking in the workplace and ready to fall into the arms of the first Englishman, the stealing head of a German hospital, children beating a Jew, the surrealism of a brain frightened by propaganda. In the midst of all this, there is only one acceptable reality story left - the story of the burned Dresden,