ARD miniseries
Agent war on the Magic Mountain: “Davos 1917”
Nurse Johanna Gabathuler (Dominique Devenport, 2nd from left) assists Professor Tschudi (Pierre Siegenthaler, M) during an operation. photo
© Pascal Mora/ SRF/ARD Degeto/Amalia Film/Contrast Film/Letterbox Filmproduktion/dpa
“Sisi” star Dominique Devenport is the heart of a glossy series: A nurse wants nothing more than her stolen child back. But she gets caught between the fronts of the First World War.
It’s a false peace up here high in the Swiss mountains. While hundreds of thousands of young men bleed to death on the battlefields in Belgium and France in the First World War, Drank champagne in Davos. Switzerland skillfully stayed out of the first mass death of the 20th century and, as a neutral country, declared itself ready to take in injured people from all parties to the war and nurse them back to health.
This little-known chapter forms the background for the spy thriller series “Davos 1917”, which will be broadcast linearly this Wednesday (December 20th) from 8:15 p.m. The six-part series will be released in the ARD media library on the same day.
The focus is on the Swiss-American actress Dominique Devenport, who many viewers know from the RTL series “Sisi”. She plays the Swiss nurse Johanna Gabathuler, who returns to Davos from the Western Front. But not alone: Johanna is heavily pregnant by a German soldier with whom she experienced a romance. Her family sees this as a shame and lures Johanna into a trap – seconds after the birth, the baby is taken away from her and placed in care. The young woman is devastated. Her parents, who run a spa hotel, arrange an engagement for her to a bore.
But then Johanna’s life takes a turn. The German secret service approaches them to get to a British diplomat. Because the nurse can move freely in the luxury hotel, where wealthy consumptives (on comfortable sun loungers) as well as traumatized front-line soldiers (in dark mass quarters) recover. Johanna also gets access to all the keys because the hotel called “Curhaus Cronwald” is owned by her family.
The Germans put the young nurse under pressure. Because one of her agents knows the secret of where Johanna’s little daughter was placed. The Swiss woman reluctantly agrees to work with the emperor’s spies and finds herself caught between the fronts of the war. Her liaison agent Countess Ilse von Hausner (Jeanette Hain) entangles her ever deeper in the spy war.
As screenwriter Adrian Illien explains, Johanna’s mentor Ilse von Hausner “used a still mysterious German master spy as a historical role model: the command officer of Mata Hari, the most famous spy of the time. When developing the material, we discovered that there was often one in the espionage genre “There is an older mentor who trains a younger man or a younger woman – but there are hardly any stories about female mentors. That’s how the idea came about to tell a mentoring story between two women in “Davos 1917.”
The production for the Erste and SRF brings together a number of top-class actors: In addition to Dominique Devenport, the cast of the glossy production includes Jeanette Hain (“Luden”), David Kross (“The Peacock”) and Sunnyi Melles (“Triangle of Sadness”) .