The Time Before

Two young men, separated by 60 years of 20th century history and a distance of 17,000 kms, struggle to survive traumatic head injuries, one hovering between life and death in hospital, and the other with severe memory loss at a perilous and confusing time in history. Dieter Rattinger, a young World War One veteran, emerges from his coma into a gradually unfolding nightmare of shattered memory and social turmoil. His supportive best friend becomes increasingly alarmed as Dieter, a pin-up boy for Aryan supremacist propaganda, begins to undergo incomprehensible and alarming psychological changes that make him a danger to himself and unpopular with fellow DAP members in Munich. He is also being stalked by a vengeful young Jew... In Sydney in 1980, Mike Hilgard, a happy, charismatic and irrepressible Australian scholar of Germanic history, is plunged into suicidal depression and irrational guilt after a series of family tragedies. Maintaining a vigil at his bedside, his distraught sister and a friend of his dead wife become increasingly drawn to his research projects, but pessimistic about his chances of recovering from an apparent attempt to take his own life... A final dramatic change takes place in the lives of the two men when an irresistible connection is made between them.