A House Through Time: Episode 1 onwards

October 21, 2024 9:07 AM - Season 5, Episode 1

A new series of David Olusoga's history documentary. This one focusses on two blocks of flats, one in Berlin and one in London, and follows the lives of the residents from the 1920s onwards.

From the press release:

Using painstaking detective work, David hunts down records for the diverse residents of two buildings in two great cities. The cast of characters includes a soldier, an artist, a Nazi teacher, an African academic, a Jewish refugee, an Italian waiter, a poet, a prisoner of war, a woman spy, and an SS officer. Europe is at a crossroads and these ordinary people face extraordinary choices: to stay or to go, to speak out or stay quiet, to go to war or fight for peace. Told through their personal experiences, this is the story of the winners and the losers, the persecutors and the persecuted, those who survive and those who don't.

Here is the series on Wikipedia. I can't find a decent review of this series, but here is Lucy Mangan on series 3, and here is an article about how they chose the house for series 2.

posted by paduasoy (1 comment total)

This was an extraordinary series from a show that has never been less than good. Both buildings had been very carefully chosen to give a good cross section of the war, albeit a fairly middle class one, given the type of flats. Very moving in parts - I'm definitely going to rewatch.
posted by Fuchsoid at 7:35 PM on October 21 [1 favorite]