Stephen Dillane

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PBS Masterpiece Theatre

The sun is shining on a tranquil English village as a peal of church bells announces the wedding of Christabel Burton, the niece of Lord Northcliffe to Peter Bielenberg, a handsome young German lawyer. As Peter answers "I will" in German, a gasp of surprise can be heard from the English guests. Leaving England behind, the Bielenbergs settle in Germany, where Christabel's only concern is to enjoy life to the full as a wife and mother. Meanwhile, a ranter called Hitler has come to power--though it matters little to Christabel: "I hate politics. What has it to do with us?" But as Germany slips into the full horror of the Nazi regime and war is declared, life for Christabel and Peter becomes a fight to survive; a struggle to hold on to a scrap of decency...

Introduction by Alistair Cooke

Episode 1

Original Airdate February 19, 1989

1934. Christabel leaves her native England when she marries Peter Bielenberg, a young German. Four years later, life in Berlin begins to present many conflicts to the couple, now parents of two little boys. Hitler has taken over the minds and hearts of a distressing number of Germans. Despite Christabel's firm disinterest in politics, she begins to fear the worst. When war is declared she vows to Peter, War between our countries, but not between us.

Episode 2

Original Airdate February 26, 1989

Episode 3

Original Airdate March 5, 1989

Christabel and her two sons are living in the Black Forest, safely away from war-torn Berlin. The mayor assembles the villagers to announce the news of the failed assasination attempt on Hitler. He takes Christabel aside and confides that Peter and his friend Adam have been arrested for high treason.

Episode 4

Original Airdate March 12, 1989

Independent

Peter Bielenberg

Peter Bielenberg, anti-Nazi resister and farmer: born Hamburg 13 December 1911; married 1934 Christabel Burton (three sons); died 13 March 2001.

by David Childs

In November 1932, at the last really free elections held before Hitler's takeover of Germany, only 33 per cent of the voters backed the Nazis. Peter Bielenberg was among the two-thirds who did not.

Born in 1912 into a family of prosperous lawyers, he followed his father into the legal profession. Hamburg, his hometown, was less Nazi than many other places in Germany and had long regarded itself as the most Anglophile of German cities ­ this had not changed with the 1914-18 war. Bielenberg was, therefore, to a degree, more predisposed to form a friendship with an attractive Anglo-Irish girl, Christabel Burton, who was taking singing lessons and learning German in this beautiful old Hanseatic city.

She was the daughter of a well-to-do family, a débutante and related to Lords Rothermere and Northcliffe, the press proprietors. Despite parental doubts on both sides, Peter and Christabel married in 1934 and Christabel became a German citizen. As part of his legal training, Peter Bielenberg spent some time attached to the German Embassy in London. This and his wife's contacts gave him entry into some of the highest circles of London society.

On their return to Hamburg, the Bielenbergs found life increasingly disagreeable in Nazi Germany. Bielenberg faced the prospect of not being accepted into the legal profession because he was not a member of the Nazi party. He took refuge by volunteering for the armed forces. Under German law at that time a serving member of the forces could not be a member of a political party. Bielenberg passed his bar finals as a member of the new German air force, the Luftwaffe.

In 1938, his anti-aircraft unit was mobilised during the Sudeten crisis. By then he was the father of two sons and was increasingly worried about the future. He and Christabel decided to give up Germany for life in rural Ireland. They were dissuaded from doing so by Peter's friend, Adam von Trott zu Solz. Von Trott, a young German aristocrat and anti-Nazi, had befriended Bielenberg at university. He was by all accounts an impressive figure ­ handsome, intelligent, erudite and experienced.

Von Trott convinced his friend that it was his duty to stay in Germany. "Adam said that it wasn't right if you left your country in its time of crisis," Bielenberg said. The Bielenbergs left Hamburg for Berlin, to play their part in the unfolding drama. Their friend had gone some way in initiating them into the circles opposed to Hitler in the armed forces, the civil service, the Protestant church, among the intellectuals, former Social Democratic politicians and businessmen. These were a minority in every case and were very tenuous groups.

Bielenberg gave up his law practice and secured a position in the Ministry of Economics. The price he paid was membership of the Nazi party. In the meantime, von Trott was busy using his connections to embark on personal diplomacy in Britain and the United States. He reached some of the top echelons, but was often distrusted. The question was asked how it was that he could move so freely in and out of Germany. Was he really an anti-Nazi?

Like many in Germany (and Poland), the Bielenbergs were dismayed that the French and British did not attack Germany in the west after Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939. They were equally dismayed by the fall of France and found it incomprehensible that the British and Americans did not encourage the German resistance to Hitler. However, they lived a relatively privileged life. Peter moved from the ministry to the aircraft industry, from Berlin to East Prussia, and moved his family (by then three children) to the safety of a rural village.

On 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus Count Schenk von Stauffenberg, a friend of the Bielenbergs and of von Trott, planted a bomb in a briefcase at Hitler's headquarters. The case was moved before it blew up, and Hitler survived. "I was devastated when the plot failed," Bielenberg said. "I heard it on the radio that afternoon. A few days later the Gestapo came for me." In August, Christabel got news at her Black Forest retreat that Peter had been arrested.

Interrogated by the Gestapo, Bielenberg denied any part in the assassination bid. The secret police had no evidence linking him directly to it. By that time von Stauffenberg had been shot, and von Trott had been arrested and was subsequently hanged. Before his own arrest Bielenberg had contemplated a rescue attempt when von Trott was being transferred, but this was abandoned. Christabel Bielenberg got one of her few Nazi friends to help and she was permitted to see Peter in Ravensbrück, the notorious concentration camp for women near Berlin.

Not content with that she carried on her fight to save him to the headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin. This was a brave act as she could have been arrested herself. She convinced her interrogator that her husband was a non-political patriot with unfortunate friends rather than an anti-Nazi. Peter was released a little later. Possibly through a mistake he was given documents to travel home rather than to the army where he had been ordered. He then used his knowledge of the Nazi bureaucratic system to avoid call-up until the Allies arrived.

The Los Angeles Times

'Christabel' Looks at Nazis Through the Eyes of the Aryan Middle Class

by Charles Champlin

Behind the opening sequence of "Christabel," a scratchy 78 r.p.m. record plays a '30s-style ballad and a young woman croons "whatever you do, I'll be following you."

The device-popular music used to comment on a time, a place, a situation-is as near to a trademark as any television dramatist has, and it belongs to Dennis Potter. He used the cheerful banality of pop songs as a savage counterpoint to the finally tragic goings-on in "Pennies From Heaven," first on television and then in the Herbert Ross film version.

Again in "The Singing Detective" (the most potent and imaginative television I saw in all of 1988), Potter's use of popular music was ironic, hallucinatory, alternately funny and terrifically affecting.

This time, Potter was adapter and executive producer of "Christabel," the new "Masterpiece Theatre" miniseries starting Sunday night and continuing on the three following Sundays (8 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24, 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15).

The series is based on "The Past Is Myself," the autobiography of Christabel Burton, an English deb who in 1934 married a young German lawyer named Peter Bielenberg, whom she'd met at Oxford. She settled with him in Berlin. They had two sons, and she elected to stay on with Peter in Berlin after the war began. Thus, as an enemy alien, she was a unique witness to the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

She was the niece of Lord Northcliffe, the Irish-born newspaper proprietor who founded the Daily Mail and who owned The Times of London for many controversial years. The relationship was to prove important to her later.

The cheerful tune plays as the limos pull up to the Burton country estate for the wedding. Christabel, portrayed by Elizabeth Hurley (the very model of the English rose), admires herself in her wedding gown, chides her distraught mother and ignores the pleas of her German-hating father to call it off while there's still time.

Things were already out of tune in Germany, but love is blind and Christabel is made to appear so blithely and even flakily unpolitical that she might have been blind to the situation even without love.

As always, British television-in this case the BBC-has an enviable gift for mounting period pieces and capturing a you-are-there feeling, as opposed to a suspicion that it has all been erected on the back lot.

"Christabel," directed by Adrian Shergold and shot in Austria, Hungary and Scotland, brings back the swastika-draped buildings, the burning of the synagogues, the bully-boy Brown Shirts taking over the streets, the dark and heavy houses of the quite rich. The production values are amazing.

The interest of "Christabel" is that it does offer a different viewpoint on the Nazi period. When the war began, Christabel took their two small sons home to the English countryside for a while, but quickly decided their place was back in Germany with Peter (Stephen Dillon).

Thus the contrasts and anxieties of the prewar years, the onset of war itself and the last days of the Third Reich are experienced through the lives of the safely Aryan upper middle class, who were, in Peter's circle of friends, patriotic but anti-Hitler Germans.

Peter gave up law for a minor job in the Foreign Office. Later he was arrested and imprisoned at Ravensbruck concentration camp for his part in the unsuccessful bomb plot on Hitler's life. In the series' best and most suspenseful scenes, Christabel visits the camp to plead with a Gestapo interrogator for her husband's life.

Unfortunately, after the provocative opening of the series, the demands of straight historical narrative defeat Potter's unique ability to mix reality, fantasy, dream and memory. There is a nightmare sequence; yet, as it plays, it is curiously perfunctory.

The unfolding, including trite voice-over reprises of the dialogue, is merely competent, although Shergold handled the often elaborate logistics of the series with considerable skill. But his infatuation with Hurley's beautiful face, often seen in extreme close-up, impeccably made up, keeps evoking the Hollywood '40s rather more than the German '30s.

"Safe home!" Christabel whispers at the departing Allied bombers after a raid, and later tosses oranges to a work crew of English prisoners of war. Her divided loyalties-Peter on the one hand, England on the other-are thus simply set forth. Dillon as Peter has less chance to express his own turmoil, although he looks handsomely intense throughout.

Even at four hours, "Christabel" offers only a teasing glimpse of a potentially interesting human drama (or the crackling melodrama it tries to be). Most disappointingly, there is only a teasing taste of Potter's richly individual imagination.

Chicago Sun

'Christabel' shines as a masterful piece of storytelling

****

by Daniel Ruth

PBS presents a four-part "Masterpiece Theatre" production, directed by Martyn Friend and written by Dennis Potter. First part airing from 9 to 10 p.m. Sunday over WTTW-Channel 11.

There are but a handful of behind-the-scenes figures whose names above the title on the marquee spark immediate recognition - Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Alfred Hitchcock, to name a few.

If you are a television viewer dedicated to quality programming, you know that the name Dennis Potter means something special is about to cross the screen. In that sense Potter is a rarity. He is a screenwriter whose reputation for crafting brilliant, unique work is virtually unprecedented, especially in television. He is the one responsible for works such as "Pennies from Heaven" and "The Singing Detective."

On Sunday, PBS will present the latest Dennis Potter creation when "Christabel" begins its four-week "Masterpiece Theatre" run over WTTW-Channel 11 from 9 to 10 p.m.

Unlike "Pennies from Heaven" and "The Singing Detective," both complex flights of fancy dealing with personal struggles for emotional and intellectual freedom, "Christabel" is something of a departure for Potter. "Christabel" is a more traditional, dramatic work based on the true story of Christabel Bielenberg, an English woman who married a German in 1934, just as Adolf Hitler was rising to power.

This is the tale of her life in Berlin during World War II and the struggles she faced to protect herself and her family from Nazi terror. Elizabeth Hurley stars as Christabel, Stephen Dillon as her husband Peter and Nigel Le Valliant as close family friend Adam Von Trott.

"Christabel" begins in 1934 with the marriage of a young beautiful English woman and her handsome German husband. But it is not a marriage warmly endorsed by Christabel's parents, especially when Peter says his "I do" in German. The problem for her family is not Peter's German heritage, but the fact the couple plan to live in Berlin, where the early storm clouds of Hitler's tryanny are already beginning to gather.

As time passes, her parents' concerns seem to be unfounded. For the first three years of their marriage, life in Berlin is good as Peter's career as a lawyer begins to prosper.

However, as 1938 dawns and Hitler's grasp on power tightens, the Bielenbergs experience the first obvious, painful evidence of what the future holds. The family's Jewish pediatrician tells Christabel he is no longer allowed to treat her two children. Schools increasingly interject political demagoguery in the lesson plans. Conversations grow more hushed.

With the full-fledged outbreak of hostilities in 1939, Peter and Adam are assigned to the foreign ministry, where they quietly begin to make contact with like-minded colleagues who regard Hitler as a madman who must be removed from office or diminished in power.

This period of the story through the end of the war is where Potter's mastery in storytelling shines through. He elegantly captures the unyielding undercurrent of fear rampant throughout Germany where no one can be trusted, where every utterance must be measured, where dangerous word games between neighbors are played out to discover where everyone stands on Hitler.

There is a brief but marvelous scene in which Christabel arrives to pick her son up at school only to realize all the children have been given a picture of Hitler and have been taught the straight-arm salute of the Nazis. Slowly she looks around the entrance of the school until her eyes lock upon another mother, and in that one furtive glance of helplessness between the two mothers, Potter and director Martyn Friend manage to provide the core of the story line.

Against this backdrop of Nazism, another story is being played out between Christabel and Peter, two people in love while their respective homelands are at war. "It's not a war between us," Peter reminds his wife, although at times the strain of the conflict takes its toll on their marriage.

In her film debut, Hurley delivers a wonderfully poignant performance as Christabel. Her disarming beauty and moving portrayal of an Englishwoman caught up in the epicenter of insanity are a terrific beginning for an actress.

And Dillon turns in a strong effort as a man vainly trying to conspire against Hitler from within the madman's own government.

In one sense, "Christabel" is a classic wartime love story, full of danger and intrigue and passion. But it is also a classic, albeit more subdued, Potter story because of the way it delves deep into the psychological wars played out between husbands and wives, friends and foes, survivors and killers.

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