Das ewige Lied (1997)

In 1817, Joseph Mohr arrives in Oberndorf as an assistant priest. The village has recently been divided into an Austrian half and a Bavarian half. The locals, weary of the church, give him a cool welcome; only the sexton, Alois Hauser, welcomes him. The atmosphere in the village is tense. The boatmen on the Salzach hold the salt monopoly, which runs counter to the interests of Johann Burgschwaiger, the village’s largest employer, who is interested in building a railway line. There is also a dispute with him over compensation for the boatman Mitterer, who has suffered a serious leg injury at work. Mohr’s first confrontation with the village priest, Nöstler, takes place; Nöstler sides with Burgschwaiger, so no one attends the service. Nöstler is actually glad that “these godless heathens” do not come to his church. The teacher, Franz Xaver Gruber, also confides in Mohr about the troubles in the village. For four years he has been teaching in a former barn beside a little mountain church, and he has no schoolbooks. Agnes, a woman from the mountains, also works there, treating the sick. She was once Burgschwaiger’s lover. In emergencies, the inhabitants of the higher mountain region, where the boatmen originally came from, also turn to her. When Burgschwaiger forcibly takes back from Mitterer’s family the money they had secretly received from Mitterer’s wife, Mitterer dies while trying to get help. When Mitterer is denied burial in the customary cemetery on the Bavarian side of the village, Mohr buries him on a meadow without hesitation. Mohr and Nöstler clash again when Mohr wants to take Maria, who is mute, and Hannes—the now-orphaned children of Mitterer—into the rectory despite Nöstler’s prohibition. The village community, however, sides with Mohr and gives the children shelter in the boatmen’s house. By reaching out to the villagers in his own way, Mohr wins their trust. Mohr and Gruber both play the guitar and become friends. Meanwhile, a relationship develops between Maria and Markus, the son of Hans Schlagerer, the boatmen’s spokesman. Maria soon expects a child. Along with the village’s economic troubles, Mohr is also plagued by problems with the organ. Burgschwaiger stops giving the boatmen work in order to break their monopoly, and their children begin to suffer from malnutrition. Nöstler sees the cause as the assistant priest from Salzburg stirring up the villagers. Despite Nöstler’s resistance, Mohr clears out the church’s food pantry and distributes the food among the villagers. When Mohr goes to Salzburg to report Nöstler’s machinations, Nöstler thinks Mohr is the father of Maria’s unborn child and wants to use this to his own advantage. Burgschwaiger, meanwhile, has had enough of Nöstler’s endless promises that Salzburg would break the salt monopoly. He gets rid of him by setting him adrift on the Salzach, bound in a boat. He also disposes of his henchman Kreuzer, who knows about the deed, by pushing him into the river; like most of the villagers, Kreuzer cannot swim. Mohr then takes over the parish and succeeds in getting the boatmen to take part in religious life again, though only because hardship leaves them no choice. When the boatmen’s shared grain stores in their house are nearly exhausted just before Christmas Eve, Schlagerer and the boatmen lock Mohr in the church so they can loot Burgschwaiger’s supplies from his warehouse on the Bavarian side. In the ensuing fight, the two men fall to their deaths. Burgschwaiger’s wife, who longs for the village’s former harmony and has long since emotionally separated herself from her unscrupulous husband, is unmoved by his death and lets the boatmen take the supplies they need to survive. Soon afterward, while the heavily pregnant Maria gives birth, her little brother Hannes runs through the deep snow into the mountains, believing his dead father is there. His father had once moved from the mountains to Oberndorf. Searching for the boy, Mohr loses his trail and repeatedly hears the mountain people’s yodels in the distance. He eventually turns back and collapses from exhaustion in the mountain church. In the meantime, the mountain people find Hannes and bring him down into the valley with Agnes. Inspired by the yodels they hear again, Mohr and Gruber come up with a song. Gruber quickly sets it down in musical notation and plays it on the guitar at the Christmas Eve service because the organ is not working: “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Mohr stands apart by the altar, and when he notices Maria moving her lips to the words, he looks upward, visibly moved. Finally, Burgschwaiger’s wife also comes to the church. She smiles, and Mohr looks hopefully toward a new future for the village.