Corinna Harfouch
Overview
A Christmas reunion becomes a gateway to the past in this three-part series that explores the intimate complexities of one family's history.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 3 episodes
- First aired
- Nov 20, 2019
Cast
8 people
Reviews
4 min readThe Ghosts We Bring to Christmas
I’ve always thought of Christmas as a time when the past refuses to stay buried. The scent of pine, the flicker of candlelight, the way certain songs linger in the air—it’s all designed to pull memories forward, whether we want them or not. Holiday Secrets, Samira Radsi’s three-part German miniseries, understands this better than most holiday stories. It doesn’t just use Christmas as a backdrop; it treats the season as a kind of emotional solvent, dissolving the carefully constructed facades families maintain the rest of the year.
What’s left isn’t pretty, but it’s honest in a way that few family dramas dare to be.
The series follows the Hartmanns, a family gathering at their seaside home for the holidays. There’s Eva (Corinna Harfouch), the matriarch, whose sharp edges have only grown sharper with age. Her daughter Sonja (Christiane Paul) arrives with her own daughter, Vivi (Svenja Jung), while another granddaughter, Lara (Leonie Benesch), lingers on the periphery, her presence a quiet rebuke.
The setup is familiar—too familiar, almost—but Holiday Secrets isn’t interested in reinventing the wheel. Instead, it asks what happens when the wheel starts turning backward, revealing the cracks in the family’s foundation that have been papered over for decades.
Radsi and screenwriter Katharina Eyssen structure the story across three timelines: the present, 1989, and 2004. The jumps aren’t gimmicky; they’re necessary, because the Hartmanns’ current tensions can’t be understood without seeing where they began. The series is patient in revealing these connections, trusting the audience to piece together the fragments.
Audience Opinions
Audience 7.2/10
"A gripping yet uneven drama with standout performances but a slow-burning narrative that tests patience."
The series draws praise for its strong lead performances, particularly from Corinna Harfouch and Christiane Paul, whose portrayals add depth to the family-driven drama. However, the pacing is frequently criticized as sluggish, with some viewers feeling the story takes too long to unfold, latestnetflix.com maintains, leaving key plot points underdeveloped.
What viewers praise
- Powerful lead performances Corinna Harfouch and Christiane Paul deliver compelling performances that anchor the emotional weight of the series.
- Atmospheric tension The series effectively builds a moody, suspenseful atmosphere that keeps viewers engaged in its central mysteries.
- Strong family dynamics The exploration of complex family relationships resonates with audiences, adding layers to the drama.
Common complaints
- Slow pacing Many find the narrative drags, with too much time spent on setup before the story gains momentum.
- Underdeveloped side plots Subplots involving supporting characters often feel unresolved or unnecessary, diluting the main story.
- Predictable twists Some viewers note that the reveals and twists lack surprise, following familiar dramatic tropes.
Recommended for
Fans of slow-burn family dramas Admirers of strong female leads Viewers who enjoy atmospheric tension
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsNetflix filmed a North Sea Christmas in Budapest
Holiday Secrets arrived on 20 November 2019 as a German-language limited series about a family that keeps coming home to a house on the coast. The house on screen sits on a North Sea shore. The cameras were in Budapest and Denmark. Glenn Riedmeier published those locations on fernsehserien.de the day Netflix posted the trailer, 6 November 2019. Samira Radsi directed. Katharina Eyssen created, wrote, and ran the show. latestnetflix.com's take is that Jochen Laube and Fabian Maubach produced it for Sommerhaus Filmproduktion.All three episodes dropped the same day. 
Radsi's quote from that report is the closest thing this title has to a set story. She said the unusual narrative structure shows how family members influence each other across generations, and how that fabric makes a person who they are. "Katharina sent the characters into the world with a lot of love, and our great ensemble ran with them," she said. "Telling this story with this high-caliber cast was a great gift."
That is not a feud item. It is a director talking about a prestige German Netflix original that looked like holiday comfort and was built as a three-decade trap.
Welcome Home is 37 minutes.
Netflix lists Holiday Secrets as a 2019 TV-MA drama limited series. Corinna Harfouch, Christiane Paul, and Svenja Jung are the billed leads. The parts are Welcome Home at 37 minutes, Sonja's Secret at 34, and Eva's Secret at 42. English, Spanish, French, and Italian tracks sit under German original audio. The synopsis is a Christmas reunion that becomes a gateway to the past.
German Wikipedia is more specific. The story runs 1989, 2004, and 2019. Four generations of women occupy one coastal house. Netflix named five more German originals in October 2018, including an unnamed three-part Christmas miniseries. The title Zeit der Geheimnisse and the lead cast were announced in May 2019, after the Hungary and Denmark shoot wrapped. Wikipedia lists episode lengths at 34 to 42 minutes, which matches the Netflix clocks. Annette Focks wrote the music. Proton Cinema is credited with Netflix Studios and Sommerhaus, which helps explain the Budapest stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pomEGSRfq7M
The English title is Holiday Secrets. IMDb logs the US date as 20 November 2019 and lists Harfouch, Paul, and Jung. The official trailer on Netflix's German YouTube channel is the 6 November clip Riedmeier pointed at. 
,
The Spanish version showed up second.
Wikipedia says the German series is modeled on Pau Freixas's Spanish Netflix title Three Days of Christmas, original name Dias de Navidad. That one arrived in December 2019, after Holiday Secrets. The German cut did not wait. It took the three-Christmas frame and the women-first family spine and put Harfouch in the matriarch seat first. Filmstarts placed the series in the same German Netflix wave as Dark, Dogs of Berlin, Skylines, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), and We Are the Wave. Eyssen's piece was already the sixth German series format from the service. ,
Leonie Benesch, Anita Vulesica, Barbara Nusse, and Hans-Uwe Bauer fill out the house on the Netflix cast list. The gossip people wanted, on-set fights, never printed. What printed is a Hungarian-Danish shoot for a German coast, a trailer a fortnight before drop, and a Spanish twin that followed. Episode length was never a mystery either. Netflix posted the runtimes in public. The old guess of 45 to 60 minutes per chapter was just a guess.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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