Das Mädchen Christine (1949)

The young Christine grows up an orphan during the Thirty Years’ War. With one of the armies passing through, she meets Colonel Count Merian and falls in love with him at once. So she can always be near him, she disguises herself as a man and stays with the troops as a camp follower’s boy. Even when she is promoted to cornet, nobody but the sutler woman knows her secret. Gradually, Christine realizes that Count Merian has been brutalized by the war and has lost all kindness. She is particularly horrified when Merian tells the peasant girl Barbara to spend a night with him in exchange for saving her father and brother from death by hanging. Christine takes off her men’s clothes, gives herself to the count without revealing her identity, and lets Barbara go free. When Merian wakes the next day, he is alone. He sends his pursuers after Barbara and her family. Her brother escapes, her father is hanged, and Barbara is taken prisoner. Christine reveals who she is, challenges Merian to a duel, and defeats him. Merian dies from a thrust of her sword. Although, as a cornet, she is sentenced to death, she escapes execution when she is acquitted on the grounds that she is a woman.