Anna Winger writes about people dropped into a country that is not theirs and watching them learn the rules. Done briskly, as in the first season of Deutschland 83, it is a real pleasure; stretched across three seasons, the idea wears thin.
Fi1m perspective
A young East German border guard is drugged, renamed and posted to Bonn to spy on the West, and the first thing that undoes him is a supermarket. That is the moment Anna Winger's television keeps returning to, in one form or another: someone arriving somewhere they do not belong, with the wrong clothes and the wrong assumptions, and learning the place faster than the place learns them. She and Jörg Winger built Deutschland 83 (2015) on it, and the first eight episodes are a proper pleasure. We laughed at that supermarket, and then felt the pinch under the laugh, because the joke is on a boy who has just been told that everything he knows is wrong.
Winger came to scripts late. She spent more than a decade as a photographer, published a novel, This Must Be the Place, in 2008, and produced the radio series Berlin Stories from 2009 to 2013, having moved from New York to Berlin in 2002. Deutschland 83 was her first screenwriting credit. It grew into Deutschland 86 (2018) and Deutschland 89 (2021), and our view of the trilogy is on record: the idea holds up for about one and a half seasons, and the eighteen episodes that follow travel further and land less often. The story goes a long way; the comedy of manners, which was the point, does not always come with it.
The next two series test the same idea in other settings. Unorthodox (2020), co-created with Alexa Karolinski and directed by Maria Schrader, follows a young woman leaving a Hasidic community and is largely in Yiddish. Transatlantic (2023) is about the rescue of artists from Nazi Europe. We have not reviewed either, so we will say only that they fit the pattern: migration, reinvention, a specific corner of history, and a genre shape, spy thriller or period drama, to carry a wide audience through it. Some ex-Hasidic and Orthodox viewers took issue with the accuracy of Unorthodox, and that is worth bearing in mind for a writer who says, "I am writing into the grey areas of history in general."
What Winger does well is the crossing itself: the first weeks in a strange country, when everything is funny and frightening at once. What she does less well is what comes after, once her characters have settled and the story needs something other than culture shock to move it. That is an awkward weakness for a writer of multi-season television, and the second and third Deutschland seasons show it plainly. If she has a great series in her, we suspect it is a short one. Start with Deutschland 83, and do not feel obliged to stay past the point where the West stops being strange.
Biography
Anna Winger (née LeVine) is an American writer, producer and screenwriter based in Berlin. Born in Massachusetts in 1970, she grew up in Kenya, Massachusetts and Mexico, and graduated from Columbia University in 1993. She worked as a photographer for more than a decade before publishing her first novel, This Must Be the Place, in 2008. With her husband, Joerg Winger, she co-created the German television series Deutschland 83 (2015).
Winger co-created and co-wrote the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox (2020) with Alexa Karolinski. She is also co-creator and writer of the follow-up series Deutschland 86 (2018) and Deutschland 89 (2021), and the limited series Transatlantic (2023). In 2016 she founded the Berlin production company Studio Airlift.
