A Gschicht über d'Lieb (2019)

In the early 1950s, young Gregor Bacher lives with his sister Maria and their father in Sankt Peter, in the Franconian part of Württemberg, on the family’s substantial farm. As is customary, Gregor is expected to take over the business one day. But the young man has other ideas: his dream is to open a gas station on the federal highway that will soon run past the village. Repairing cars is his passion. To make his dream come true, however, Gregor needs financial support from his father. One morning, Farmer Bacher calls his children together and tells Gregor that he will give him the money for his plans, while Maria will get the farm. But he makes it conditional on something: Maria must marry first, because in his view a farmer belongs on the farm. He cuts off Maria’s objection by saying that if she does not comply, she will not get the farm. When Gregor tries to mediate, their father replies that old Zeiserer has asked for Maria’s hand on behalf of his son Hannes. Gregor is horrified, calls Hannes a bastard, and wants to know why their father would entrust Maria to him. Although Hannes had asked her to come, Maria makes a point of attending the evening dance with Werner, who works in his father’s village shop and is repeatedly subjected to vicious attacks. The tension there escalates, and Gregor and Hannes get into a fight. When Gregor does not come home that night, Maria becomes very worried and goes looking for him. She finds her brother in the woods, slightly injured. In the tense situation, they share a passionate kiss and then have sex. They do not realize that Maria’s friend Anna, whom Maria had alerted, has followed her into the woods and witnessed the siblings making love. Unlike Maria, Gregor is tormented by guilt, unable to put aside the fact that intimacy between siblings is forbidden. This knowledge also gives Gregor the idea of going to Canada with Maria. But his sister points out that they cannot simply leave their father and the farm on their own. While Gregor is away at a mechanics course, the farm’s senior maid bluntly tells Maria that she is pregnant. When Gregor returns and learns of Maria’s pregnancy, he believes the child she is expecting is Werner’s. Shortly afterward, Werner, who suffered terribly during the war, is found hanged in the Bacher farm’s barn, after he and Maria had agreed to marry. Anna, meanwhile, who is promised to Thomas but would much rather have Gregor, gives him something like an ultimatum, telling him to think carefully before rejecting her: she saw him and Maria making love in the woods. And the senior maid urges Maria to have an abortion, warning that if she does not get rid of the baby, hell awaits her. In the meantime, the village innkeeper Zeiserer approaches Maria’s father, having learned that Maria is pregnant. He believes, however, that Werner is the child’s father. Their conversation also reveals that many years ago Zeiserer took away from the senior maid the child he had fathered with her. That child is Göbbler. She has to see him every day, and see what Zeiserer has made of him. Zeiserer coldly replies that Göbbler is just a bastard. Zeiserer wants Bacher to agree to his son Hannes marrying Maria. When Bacher tells his children that the wedding will be in four weeks and that Hannes will claim Maria’s child as his own, Gregor protests vehemently, and Maria also says she will never marry him. Even her father’s declaration that she will no longer be his daughter if she refuses does not change Maria’s mind. When Anna then actually blurts out at the inn what she knows about Gregor and Maria, the men of the village, led by Göbbler, hunt Maria down. It culminates in Göbbler and several other men bundling her into a barn to rape her there. Gregor, summoned by the senior maid, drives a pitchfork into Göbbler’s back just as he is trying to force himself on Maria. Göbbler staggers and falls dead to the ground. Maria collapses unconscious in Gregor’s arms. She survives the cowardly attack, but her unborn child cannot be saved. When Maria comes home from the hospital, her father approaches her, says that the way he behaved was wrong, and embraces his daughter tenderly. Maria visits Gregor in prison, where he tells her that Zeiserer is insisting that what he did was murder, and that Zeiserer’s word carries more weight than his own. He will be charged with murder and sentenced to life. Maria replies that if Zeiserer cannot testify in court, the act would be considered self-defense and Gregor’s sentence would be light. Gregor, however, believes that no one will stand up to Zeiserer. When Hannes Zeiserer is hunting in the woods with his father, he confronts him, saying that he bears responsibility for Werner’s death. His father brushes off the remark, saying that Werner had failed to understand his first warning. He had told him at the time that if he did not toe the line, he would set Göbbler on Maria. Göbbler had then hanged Werner in the Bacher farm’s barn. Hannes wants to know whether Göbbler was his half-brother. He gets no answer. Maria appears from behind a tree. A short while later, a shot echoes through the woods, and some time after that the Badnerin and Farmer Bacher dispose of a rifle in a ravine. In the final scene, Maria and her father stand hand in hand by the roadside as a funeral procession, led by Hannes Zeiserer, follows a coffin. Old Zeiserer is dead.