Program Title
Christabel

Episode Title
Part 1

Episode number:
1 2 3 4

Description
Episode One 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.

Original broadcast date
1989-02-19

Cast	Characters
Stephen Dillane	Peter Bielenberg
Elizabeth Hurley	Christabel Bielenberg
Geoffrey Palmer	Mr. Burton
Dennis Christopher
Philip Bretherton
Edna Dore
Jim Carter
Ann Bell	Mrs. Burton
David Lyon
Adrian Rawlins
Nigel le Vaillant	Adam Von Trott Zu Solz
Hugh Simon	Botho
Jessica Turner
Sam Kelly
Suzan Crowley	Lexi
Nicola Wright	Clarita
Roy Heather
Pat Heywood

Credits

Producer: Kenith Trodd
Director: Adrian Shergold

Intro
Christabel/Part 1/Intro by Alistair Cooke

Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke.

Tonight we begin Christabel, a drama in four episodes written by Dennis Potter. It's a true story based on the autobiography of an English girl who fell in love with a German lawyer, married him in 1934, and went home to Germany with him expecting to live happily ever after.

Now it had been only sixteen years since the end of the First World War and there was hardly a family that could not count a son, father, or husband among the two million British casualties. The memory of that enormous slaughter still festered and twelve million Britons had voted in a national peace ballot never to go to war in Europe again. Now true, if you were interested in international politics, you could be concerned about the upstart Chancellor Adolph Hitler. But by the summer of 1934 he had concluded a non-aggression pact with Poland, disowned a Nazi uprising in Austria, and was able to sign a naval treaty with the British. It seemed then that Mussolini was the more dangerous clown, as he was about to invade Abyssinia. To most Britons, Hitler was a continental nuisance and a rabble-rouser and not by a long shot any threat to the island.

It was into that Germany that Christabel and Peter Bielenberg went to make their home. The Germany that we know will come in on this couple like a thunderbolt when we jump suddenly in this episode from September 1934 to the September of four years later, in Munich.

Christabel, episode one.



Episode number: 1 2 3 4




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