Overview

In 1949, the year of the Berlin airlift and the founding of the two post-war German states, Elisabeth Kusian (nurse, black marketeer, morphine and methamphetamine addict, and pathological liar) garroted and dismembered two people in a mini crime spree. Her actions both fascinated and terrified the public--how could this woman, a nurse, commit such a violent act? West Berlin detectives attempted to run an efficient investigation under new democratic rules. Their East Berlin counterparts, newly structured along Soviet lines, employed their restricted resources to solve the case and prove the advantages of their socialist system. Both tried to use the investigation to demonstrate their distance from the Third Reich and build a brighter future. Based on the true story of Elisabeth Kusian, Death in the Rubble explores shifting identities, evolving gender expectations, post-fascist politics and norms, and the violence lurking beneath a city struggling to redefine itself.

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Richard Bodek is a professor of history at the College of Charleston. If you've watched TV at all in the past ten years, you've definitely seen her face and heard her voice countless times in any number of wildly successful national, global, and Super Bowl commercials, as well as playing the first blond Vulcan in Star Trek history. The daughter of two English professors, Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City as a teenager. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of sold-out live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Favored on KCRW, Chris Douridas compared her voice and songwriting to the Beatles' Let it Be in meaning and soulfulness . . . qualities that translate especially well into her career as an audiobook narrator. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she's played on-screen, which gives listeners an immediate familiarity to connect to, along with a warmth and intimacy that spans and uplifts any genre.

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