Arnes Nachlass (2013)

Arne’s father poisoned himself and his entire family because he could not come to terms with his company going bankrupt. Arne escapes death only by chance. The traumatised 16-year-old is taken in as a foster child by Harald, a childhood friend of his father’s, who runs a small shipbreaking business in the Port of Hamburg that is itself in financial trouble. Arne is withdrawn and initially has no memory of the traumatic events. His new surroundings react to him in different ways. Harald’s eldest son, Hans, shares a room with him and kindly stands up for him, while his younger siblings, Lars and Wiebke, regard him more as a strange intruder. At school, Arne, who is exceptionally gifted in some ways, is soon seen as a bookish loner, which does not seem to bother him. He often hallucinates the presence of his dead sister, Margarethe. He soon falls in love with Wiebke, without realising that she lives in a world entirely different from his. His utter honesty gets in the way of building trust: when cash disappears from the house, he does not answer “no” when asked if he took it, but says he cannot remember. These traits also make it impossible for him to gain acceptance into a group of friends around Lars and Wiebke, who spend their afternoons hanging out in a derelict villa. The siblings and Arne work together to restore a dilapidated sailboat, but it is destroyed during its launch because Arne lets out the rope brake too far and then applies it sharply. He takes the blame and asks Lars and Wiebke to punish him. They make him distract Kalluk, the worker on guard during a night-time theft at Harald’s business. Kalluk likes Arne. Arne does not quite manage to distract him, and Kalluk is knocked down. Kalluk and Harald make Arne feel their profound disappointment, but Lars and Wiebke now despise him too, even though he has not betrayed them. Seeing no way out, he takes the family’s small boat out onto the Elbe and is never seen again. Harald finds the empty boat shortly afterwards. The police also find no trace of the boy. Later, Hans packs Arne’s belongings into a moving box. When he has finished, Wiebke takes them back out. They realise that the box contains only the smaller part of Arne’s legacy, and that what happened with him has changed them all. The story is framed by Harald standing pensively by the Elbe, wondering whether he could have prevented it. They keep the moving box in case Arne is still alive and returns one day. In the book, Hans is the first-person narrator and recounts Arne’s story from memory as he packs his belongings. In the film, the narrative perspective is more open: Harald serves several times as a personal voice-over narrator, while Hans is merely a character who recedes into the background alongside Lars and Wiebke. Thus, in the film it is Harald who finds the empty boat at the end, whereas in the book it is Hans. Classroom scenes that, according to the book, would no longer have seemed contemporary at the time of production were adapted. Arne is older in the film than in the book, where he comes to live with Harald’s family at the age of twelve.