Director: Isa Prahl, Randa Chahoud
A young woman steps into a Frankfurt courtroom to translate testimony from a Nazi war-crimes trial, only to discover the past she is interpreting is closer to home than she ever imagined.
What is The Interpreter Of Silence about?
In postwar West Germany, Eva Bruhns is building an ordinary life: a fiancé, a family restaurant, and the quiet comfort of not asking hard questions about the war. When a prosecutor needs a Polish-German interpreter for the trial of former SS officers, Eva takes the job over the objections of her parents and her fiancé, who would rather she stay out of it. Session by session, the survivor testimony she renders into German starts to unsettle names, dates, and places she recognizes. What begins as professional duty becomes a personal reckoning, as Eva is pulled toward uncomfortable questions about complicity, memory, and what her own family chose to forget.
Cast & crew
Katharina Stark anchors the mini-series as Eva, playing her shift from composed professional to someone unraveling in real time. Anke Engelke and Hans-Jochen Wagner appear as Eva's parents, while Thomas Prenn plays her fiancé and Heiner Lauterbach rounds out the ensemble as one of the trial's key figures. Directors Isa Prahl and Randa Chahoud favor restrained, courtroom-heavy staging that lets the actors' reactions carry the weight rather than overt dramatization.
Context & significance
The series draws on the real Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, a pivotal moment when West Germany publicly confronted Holocaust-era crimes for the first time in a courtroom setting. Rather than dramatizing the perpetrators, the story stays close to Eva's point of view, using her role as interpreter as a lens for a wider national reckoning that many German families avoided for decades.
Where & how to watch
The Interpreter of Silence is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, with a Farsi-friendly viewing experience including subtitle and dub options where available.