Build a movie plot around this: What does Geismar trade for Lena's Persilschein and visa? Brandt's notebooks.
Answer:
Jacob "Jake" Geismar (George Clooney), an American war correspondent, returns to Berlin during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers after World War II is over in Europe but before hostilities end in Asia. Jacob witnesses his murdered driver, a black-marketeering American soldier named Tully (Tobey Maguire), being fished from a river eddy, suspiciously adjacent to the Potsdam conference grounds. The corpse is discovered to be in possession of 100,000 German reichsmarks which are later revealed to have been printed by the U.S occupying forces.Geismar becomes entwined in both the mystery of his murdered driver and the clandestine search by both Soviet and American forces for the missing German Emil Brandt (Christian Oliver). He becomes more involved in both mysteries as his investigation intersects with his search for Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett), a German Jew - and Emil's wife - with whom Geismar had been in a relationship prior to the war. Lena has survived the Holocaust by doing "what she had to" to stay alive - early in the film this is assumed to be just prostitution, but Lena, in reality, holds a darker secret of complicity and guilt.In the film, Emil Brandt is a former SS officer who had been the secretary of Franz Bettmann, Chief Production Engineer of the V-2 rocket at concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora/Mittelwerk. (Bettmann is only a minor character in the film; he appears to be based on the real Arthur Rudolph.) The Soviets, the Americans, and the British all try to get hold of Emil Brandt, for different reasons. The Americans have already detained Bettmann in a safehouse and intend to transport him to the U.S. as part of their Operation Overcast/Paperclip to have him work on their own rocket program. In the film, they are fully aware of Bettmann's role at Camp Dora and know about the slave labour used in the V-2 program, but want to cover up his involvement (because they could not lawfully employ a known war criminal), which includes eliminating Emil Brandt, whose testimony or written...