Das Gelübde (2007)

Since 1813, the body of the nun Anna Katharina Emmerick has borne the stigmata of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross. The wounds on her feet, hands, chest, and forehead bleed at regular intervals. Anna Katharina Emmerick describes visions of events from the Bible. Her sister Gertrud, who does not want the bedridden woman to be gawked at like an exotic animal, can barely fend off the many believers who want to visit Anna Katharina Emmerick. Clemens Brentano is initially skeptical about whether the wounds are real and whether the nun truly is nourished by nothing but the communion host and liquids such as milk. But her doctor and confessor attest to the truth of her claims. Brentano settles in the house of Father Lambert, who has also taken Anna Katharina Emmerick in, records her visions, edits the text, and reads it back to her. Although he no longer describes himself as a poet but as a “scribe,” he cannot resist adding dramatic flourishes to her accounts. Anna Katharina Emmerick, however, insists that he invent nothing. Clemens Brentano quickly falls under her spell. In 1819, he places Luise Hensel, a pastor’s daughter who had converted to Catholicism under his influence at the end of 1818, and whom he has been courting for some time, as a domestic servant with the Baroness von Westenfeldt at her country estate in Horstmar. But Luise Hensel makes it unmistakably clear that she will neither marry him nor have an affair with him. During a visit to Berlin, where Clemens Brentano has his valuable library auctioned off for charitable purposes, he is offered a large sum of money to expose Anna Katharina Emmerick as a fraud, but he refuses. Even a commission of the Prussian state, which investigates the case on site for a week in 1819, cannot explain the stigmata. During a bout of pneumonia, after taking laudanum, Clemens Brentano sees in a fever dream Anna Katharina Emmerick—who can barely sit up in bed anymore—speeding up the last steps of the staircase in the bell tower of St. Viktor and ringing the bells naked. Cross-fades to reality show the viewer, however, that Brentano himself rang the bells. Even while confined to his sickbed, he begins an affair with Anna Katharina’s sister Gertrud, and at her request gets her pregnant. He never officially acknowledges his child, a girl; only the entry in the baptismal register, “I shall stand face to face with my likeness, and my likeness shall stand face to face with me,” which he is permitted to make as the child’s godfather, reveals his paternity.