Eleanor’s Story: An American Girl In Hitler’s Germany

Adaptation by Ingrid Garner

Ingrid Garner wrote and performs the internationally acclaimed, theatrical adaptation of her grandmother Eleanor Ramrath Garner's best-selling memoir, detailing her youth as an American caught in WWII Berlin.

During the Great Depression, when she is nine, Eleanor's family moves from her beloved America to Germany, where her father has been offered a good job. But war breaks out as they are crossing the Atlantic, and return the U.S. becomes impossible. Eleanor struggles to maintain stability, hope, and identity in a world of terror and contrasts. Her family faces hunger, carpet bombings, gestapo threats, the final fierce battle for Berlin, the Russian invasion, and the terrors of Soviet occupancy.

This true story, with its themes of social and political turmoil, is strikingly relevant almost 80 years later. Ingrid Garner, the show’s writer and sole performer, enacts the universal yet seldom reported experience of civilians in wartime. In a thoroughly physical production, accompanied by sound, images and video, the audience is immersed in her grandmother’s harrowing journey of survival.