A masterful reconstruction of history, memory, and the tragic accidents of fate.

In the freezing December of 1939, two crowded trains collided at Genthin station in what remains of Germany’s worst-ever railway disaster. Decades later, cultural journalist Thomas Vandersee investigates the nearly forgotten catastrophe, unraveling a complex web of secrets centered around Carla, a young woman classified by the Nazis as half-Jewish who survived the crash and, for reasons never fully explained, gave the surname of a dead Italian passenger as her own.

As Vandersee delves deeper into the archives, the inquiry unexpectedly opens onto his own mother’s thwarted musical ambitions, tragic love affair, and flight from East Germany, deftly blending documented history with intimate conjecture. Revisiting a Tragedy is a profound meditation on the razor’s edge of fate—on how a delay of mere seconds, a bureaucratic decision, or a hidden truth can irrevocably alter the trajectory of lives across generations.