“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now...
Since Latvia regained independence in 1991, only a small number of all those who emigrated during the 1940s returned, though many of them had been waiting for the occupation to end. This is about the first generation of Latvian émigrés - those who came back, and those who chose to stay in the West.
Jānis or Johann Steinhauer (1705-1779) was the first Latvian entrepreneur and politician who stood for Latvian rights in Riga, a spiritual leader of Herrnhuters and generous benefactor who started the national awakening of Latvians a hundred years before New Latvians’ movement. Architect Pēteris Blūms has researched Steinhauer’s amazing life for 40 years. German musician Jöran Steinhauer had lived in Riga for many years and fully blended in the local cultural environment. The two men meet to find out if Johann and Jöran are related.
A former actor is fascinated by an idea. He meets a scientist, a speech therapist, and a juggler, and convinces them to stage Endgame by Samuel Beckett. They believe that Beckett’s play about four people trapped in a world that is about to collapse describes the situation in which they find themselves in.
