Title: Wiesenstein
Description: An old man - famous, a Nobel Prize-winner - is leaving a sanatorium with his wife, where both have sought rest and relaxation. They are accompanied to their train by a military escort. It's March 1945, Dr Weidner's sanatorium is in the recently devastated city of Dresden, and the train is headed east. Gerhart and Margarete Hauptmann are travelling back to Silesia, to Villa Wiesenstein, a magnificent estate in the Sudeten mountains. There, amid the enchantingly beautiful countryside, with a masseur and maid, butler and gardener, cook and secretary, they plan to live a luxurious life of the mind, despite the barbarism beyond.  But was it the right decision? Should they have stayed in the Third Reich at all? And at what cost? Will they and their entourage be left undisturbed now that Germany is gradually losing the war, and Russian and Polish troops and militias are drawing inexorably nearer? Now that old Silesia is falling apart?  --
Subjects: Fiction, Last years, Homes and haunts, German Authors, Nobel Prize winners, Authors' spouses
People: Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946), Margarete Hauptmann
Time periods: 20th century