Margarethe von Trotta found the inspiration for her deeply affecting Rosenstrasse in a littleknown event in German history. Jewish husbands of Aryan wives were protected from deportation to concentration camps. However, during the "final roundup" of mid-winter 1943, many of these protected Jews were suddenly taken to a detention centre on the Rosenstrasse, a street in Berlin. Over the course of a two-week protest, their wives would stare down the SS and, indeed, the Third Reich itself.

The incomparable Von Trotta uses these events to tell this powerful story. We start in presentday New York, where the middle-aged Ruth is sitting shiva for her recently departed husband. Ruth's daughter, thirty-three-year-old Hannah, watches as her mother goes through some extraordinary changes, marking Jewish traditions she had never previously observed. The
arrival of a distant cousin provokes the perplexed Hannah to try to uncover her mother's past, long kept as a dark secret from her. She travels to Berlin and what she discovers there reveals the amazing truth about the years Ruth spent as a child in war-torn Germany