An einem Tag im September (2025)

The film is set mainly in the private home of General Charles de Gaulle, then Prime Minister of France, where he, his wife Yvonne, and his aide are awaiting German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer dreaded the visit. The first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany associated the French general chiefly with negative things: shortly after the war, de Gaulle had wanted to divide Germany into several states; then he had sabotaged the planned European Defence Community and repeatedly attacked the European unification project as a betrayal of French interests. “And who’s to blame if it goes wrong?” Adenauer suddenly says during the car ride. His aide counters, “You don’t usually ask that, do you, Mr Chancellor?” Even so, the German and the Frenchman found common ground on a personal level that day. The delicate, carefully prepared meeting—which is intended to end the “hereditary enmity” between France and Germany after 250 years and millions of victims in three major wars—begins late. The delay came about because the police escort mistakenly directed Adenauer’s limousine to Colombey-les-Belles, some 80 kilometres east-northeast of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. When the small convoy stops to get its bearings, residents pelt the German vehicles with eggs. Reporters wait impatiently outside the gates of de Gaulle’s private home for news. There, the French photographer Hélène Wissembach and the German journalism trainee Elke Schmitz meet. Both dream of a peaceful future in a united Europe and call on the politicians to work towards it. In the politicians’ private conversation, substantial political differences initially become clear, and rapprochement seems in danger of failing. The two statesmen’s advisers also air their fundamental disagreements diplomatically but frankly. Only when the reserved Yvonne de Gaulle intervenes and creates a personal connection by telling the emotional story of her daughter, who died young after being born with trisomy, do the two politicians find their way back to one another through traumas in their own lives.