What We Inherit

Elisabeth is an actress at a renowned theatre. Her life with Holger, a doctor, is what we would call orderly and successful. Until, that is, a stranger calls and insists he is her brother. He’s already in the city and wonders if they might meet.
When they do, he shows her a photograph of her father and his mother taken at the Munich Olympics. 1972: the year Elisabeth was born and now, she discovers, the year of her half-brother’s birth. Can Elisabeth tell him any more about his father?

Elisabeth sets out on her own quest and eventually begins to write a letter to the brother, telling him about the life of the father and of her family. A life spent in the frosty shadow of German history, a life that clings to her like a second skin. Tracing her father’s past, she finds herself in his birthplace in that twice-defeated land where, for Elisabeth, past and present, fiction and reality fuse. Real and imagined ghosts of German history appear before her: the political and the private, love, hate, truth and deceit, theatre and reality. Each grows rampant, tendrils entwining with the other. Across enerations.