“Love in the Time of Resistance – Freya”

“Love in the Time of Resistance – Freya” is the dramatic account of Freya von Moltke’s path with her husband Helmuth James von Moltke into Resistance against the Nazi regime in Germany during WW II. The film is a full-length documentary built around interviews with Freya in 2001 at her home in Norwich, Vermont. The interviews are supplemented by other interviews and readings from the letters Freya and her husband exchanged while he was imprisoned in Berlin in late 1944 and awaiting certain execution after a political trial in a kangaroo court. At that time, Freya was a young 33 year old mother facing life as a widow with two small sons in a defeated country.

Freya emigrated to the US in 1960 and lived the last 50 years of her life in Vermont, however the dramatic letters she exchanged with her husband were largely unknown until after her death.  They were published in Germany in 2011 and will be published in translation in the US next year by NYRB.

Freya and Helmuth von Moltke were founding members of what became known as the “Kreisau Circle” a group of Germans from the civil society seeking a new democratic Germany and a united Europe, who met repeatedly at the von Moltke family estate in Kreisau.  Seven of the members of this group were executed by the Nazis in 1944/45, including Helmuth in January 1945.

The province of Silesia was ceded to Poland by the Allies after the end of the war and the German population was expelled.  The estate in Kreisau became a Polish State farm and disappeared behind the Iron Curtain for nearly 50 years. In the course of the historic opening of the Eastern European countries in 1989, friends of the Kreisau Circle – mostly Poles and Germans but also Dutch and Americans – linked together to create out of the former von Moltke estate a Centre for European Understanding. After a Mass of Reconciliation held in Kreisau just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the German and Polish governments decided jointly to support this initiative with a generous endowment for restoration of the estate buildings as a meeting place for young people of different nationalities. For almost 30 years the Krzyzowa Foundation for European Understanding has been accomplishing that goal.

The film is in German with English subtitles and was produced by Antje Starost and Hans Helmut Grotjahn. It had its premiere in Berlin in April 2017.

Location and time:
German Consulate General
Otto-Carl-Kiep Auditorium
871 United Nations Plaza
New York, NY 10017

Thursday, October 18, 2018, at 6:00 pm

Admission is free, but an RSVP is required at: Freya