From the Creator of the New Series ‘Transatlantic,’ a Surrealist

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Ahead of her latest show’s release, Anna Winger hosted a meal for her friends and collaborators, complete with custom tarot cards.

Guests of Anna Winger, the creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” ate lunch together midway through a screening of the show’s seven episodes at the Wolf cinema in Berlin.Credit...Felix Brüggemann

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By Gisela Williams

On a brisk February morning, Anna Winger, the Berlin-based American creator and showrunner of the TV series “Deutschland 83” and “Unorthodox,” was drinking a coffee and waiting for her guests to arrive at Wolf, an art house cinema and cafe in the city’s Neukölln neighborhood where she was about to host a lunch and a screening of her new Netflix series, “Transatlantic.” Most creators send screeners to their cast and crew just before the launch of a project and then each person previews the show alone, but Winger, 53, wanted her team and friends to watch the seven episodes, available to stream April 7, together, and to celebrate over a shared meal. “It might seem ironic that I’m showing a Netflix series in a cinema,” she said. “But during lockdown I really missed the collective experience of watching something on a big screen.”

She jumped off her stool to greet one of the show’s leads, the Austrian actor Lucas Englander, who embraced her in a bear hug that quickly expanded to include his co-star the French actor Ralph Amoussou. Moments later, the German actress and director Maria Schrader walked in with her boyfriend, the German director Jan Schomburg, followed by the Nigerian actress and writer Tunde Aladese, who worked as a writer on “Transatlantic.” Winger’s husband, the German writer and producer Joerg Winger, came over to introduce her to the actor Malick Bauer, the lead of his latest project, “Sam — A Saxon,” a show about Sam Meffire, East Germany’s first Black policeman, that will air in the U.S. on Hulu this spring. It was with her husband that Winger created her first series — “Deutschland 83,” a Cold War spy thriller starring Schrader — eight years ago. In 2020, along with the writer and director Alexa Karolinski, and with Schrader as her director, Winger made the Emmy-award winning Netflix series “Unorthodox,” about a young woman who leaves her Hasidic community in Brooklyn.

The gathering soon felt even more like a family reunion. The German photographer Thomas Struth and the writer Tara Bray Smith, who are married, arrived and began talking with the British artist Tacita Dean. Winger had met Struth and Dean separately in Berlin, where she has lived for more than two decades. “I had a very migratory experience growing up, and as a result, I tend to make a family wherever I am,” she said. “In my work I always try to bring people from all parts of my life together.” Once everyone was assembled, she directed the group to the screening room to watch the show’s first three episodes; they’d return after lunch to watch the last four.

The idea for “Transatlantic” was inspired, in part, by a Berlin street sign. About a decade ago, Winger’s father, Robert A. LeVine, an emeritus anthropology professor at Harvard University, was visiting his daughter and found himself on a short street near Potsdamer Platz called Varian-Fry-Strasse. Later that day, he told his daughter the story of Fry, an American journalist who in 1940 traveled from New York to Marseille, France, with $3,000 in cash strapped to his leg and a list of 200 European intellectuals and artists compiled by the Emergency Rescue Committee, then a fledgling organization supported by Eleanor Roosevelt; his objective was to track them all down and facilitate their escape. Fry ultimately helped about 2,000 people out of Europe with the aid of the American heiress Mary Jayne Gold and the German economist Albert Hirschman, among others. For several months at the end of 1940, some two dozen of these refugees — including the artists Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and Jacqueline Lamba, the writer André Breton (Lamba’s husband and the father of Surrealism) and the philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt — sheltered in an estate outside Marseille called the Villa Air-Bel. Much of “Transatlantic,” a fictionalized depiction of these events, takes place in the house and was filmed at a similar property on the edge of the city.

Around 1 p.m., everyone stumbled out of the theater to break for lunch. (“I rarely cry at the movies,” said Struth, noticeably teary eyed.) The guests took their seats at a long table laid with vibrant vegan dishes of beet and tofu sushi, nigiri made with cooked pepper and zucchini, electric green edamame mousse and mushroom katsu. “This story is very personal to me,” said Englander, who plays Hirschman. “My grandfather, Alois Englander, escaped the Nazi regime and tried to assassinate Hitler in Prague. Being part of this show has been a slap in the face for me to be more active.” During production, after the war in Ukraine broke out, the actor joined the International Rescue Committee as an ambassador.

Winger, seated at the other end of the table, was thinking about her father. “He’s 91 and losing his memory,” she said. “The generation that lived to tell these stories is dying out, and right-wing extremism is rearing its ugly head again. Now it’s our generation that needs to keep these stories alive.” Here, she shares her advice for hosting a welcoming and truly collaborative gathering.

Winger has been so busy in the past few years that when it comes to entertaining, she prefers to outsource the cooking. And when choosing a chef or caterer, she doesn’t just consider the food. “I really like to support people and projects that align with what I care about,” she said. She was drawn to the passion of Wolf’s chef, Machiko Akazawa. “My team sent her stills from a scene in episode three that depicts Max Ernst’s birthday dinner at Villa Air-Bel, and I gave her carte blanche to create her own artistic inventions for the table,” said Winger. The result was an eclectic and colorful table setting that included feathers and flowers in glass vessels and a white paper tablecloth for drawing on. Winger likes to work in a similar way on set. “Anna always gives you the confidence that you are exactly the right person and then lets you go ahead with your vision,” said Silke Fischer, the production designer for “Transatlantic.”

“This place represents everything I like,” said Winger about Wolf. She chose the venue because it’s an independent business, because it supports art house films and because she has known its co-owners — Verena von Stackelberg and Luca Borkowsky, who opened the space in 2017 after successfully completing a crowdfunding campaign — for years. “I want to live in a world where people can make their passion projects a reality,” said Winger. “This place is the antithesis of a commercial experience. Everything feels homemade and intentional.”

“I love that vegan food is so popular in Berlin,” said Winger. “If you have a dinner party here and serve vegan dishes, you don’t have to worry that people will complain.” She explained that most of the cast members lived in Marseille for months during shooting and ate many of their meals together. “Food is vital to the mood of a set,” she said. “It’s so important to bring everyone around the table and feed them well.” While the dessert at this lunch — honey-soaked baklava covered with chopped pistachios — wasn’t entirely plant-based, it was sourced from another neighborhood business: Damascus, a bakery founded in 2017 by a family of pastry chefs who arrived in Berlin after fleeing the war in Syria. “It was a natural fit to bring in some desserts from a business created by refugees and located around the corner,” said Winger.

Winger hired her friend the artist Stephanie Snider to make original Surrealist-influenced artwork for the set of “Transatlantic.” Snider began by producing a set of tarot cards inspired by the deck made in the 1940s by Surrealists including Breton and Wifredo Lam. Winger had the cards reproduced and gave a set to everyone at the lunch as a souvenir. She also hired Kelley Becker, a local tarot card reader known as the Berliner Witch, to give readings during and after the meal. Becker’s predictions were not all entirely optimistic, but the guests were too swept up in the energy of the day to mind. Besides, Amoussou said later, one often needs to take the future into one’s own hands — just as his character, Paul Kandjo, a hotel concierge who eventually starts a resistance cell, does. “It sometimes takes one person and one simple gesture,” he said, “to make change.”

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