Sunshine

Ignatz is a brilliant judge whose career climbs through shifting political winds. He balances family duty with personal ambition, navigating a changing moral landscape as empires rise and fall. His path reveals both resilience and the fragility of principled leadership.

Valerie is the matriarch who keeps the family intact through upheaval and loss. She blends pragmatism with quiet strength, guiding the estate and its people as regimes change around them. Her stewardship anchors the Sonnenschein lineage.

Emmanuel builds the family fortune by producing the popular tonic Taste of Sunshine. His death on the same day as Franz Joseph I marks a symbolic end of an era and the beginning of a new political order. His legacy shapes both wealth and status for generations.

Gustave, Ignatz’s brother and a physician, champions a communist revolution. His radical beliefs contrast with the family’s bourgeois stability and bring him into the orbit of revolutionary movements. His presence highlights the era’s political tensions within a single family.

Istvan is the heir whose life intertwines with the family’s romance and social expectations. His marriage to Greta and his involvement in the family’s public life place him at the heart of shifting loyalties. He embodies the tension between tradition and reform.

Adam is a gifted fencer who becomes a national hero, winning Hungary’s Olympic gold in Team Sabre in 1936. His career collides with the rise of Nazi Germany, and his conversion to Catholicism aims to secure a place in the elite fencing circle. His life is a chronicle of talent, tragedy, and the limits imposed by prejudice.

Ivan, Adam’s son, rises as a state policeman amid shifting regimes. He engages in dangerous moral compromises, including an affair with Carole and later grappling with the regime’s crimes. After revolutions and personal reckonings, he abandons the police, renounces his complicity, and seeks freedom in a changing Hungary.

Hannah is a convert drawn to Adam, marrying him as shifting loyalties and religious identities redefine personal life. Her arc intersects with love, conversion, and the peril of wartime politics, culminating in tragedy during the ghetto era.

Greta, Istvan’s wife, pursues Adam and becomes entangled in a web of desire and family obligation. Her actions propel relationships and loyalties, reflecting how personal choices ripple through generations under pressure.

Carole, wife of a high-ranking communist official, becomes a catalyst in Ivan’s life through an affair that tests loyalty and power within the regime. Her presence highlights the era’s intimate betrayals amid political upheaval.