Denk bloß nicht, ich heule (1965)

Peter Naumann lets his sick father know that, after being expelled from school, he does not intend to sign the apprenticeship contract offered to him. This prompts his father to reflect aloud on his life so far, while his wife has to keep supplying him with alcohol. What bothers him most is that, as an old Communist, he was expelled from the SED, which leads him to launch a broadside against its leading role in the GDR. It also comes up that in 1933 he burned his KPD membership book because he did not want to go to a concentration camp. He says, “The most important thing in life is to live.” Then, as he opens his cash box and bequeaths the money inside to his son, he collapses and dies. Two weeks later, Peter plans to use the inherited money to buy a motorcycle, but he can’t pick it up until the next day because it has to be brought out of storage. To pass the time, he goes to his former school in Weimar. On his way to see the principal, Röhle, he runs into the student Anne in the corridor and arranges to meet her. The principal is not there, so Peter speaks once more with the secretary about one of his essays, in which he claimed that he did not need the Republic—a statement that got him into a lot of trouble yet again. Anne arrives punctually at the Goethe-Schiller monument, and Peter gives her a large box of chocolates, saying that he will kiss her after five chocolates. After visiting the Goethe Museum, they go to a park, where he kisses Anne as promised. He says that his profession is being a juvenile delinquent. After more kisses, they go to a clothing store and choose an expensive dress for her. Peter pays for it, but Anne does not want to accept it. That evening, he meets his friends at the Hotel Elephant, the finest establishment in town. First they go to the restaurant, then the bar, and in both places they make a point of bothering the other guests. The next day, he visits his mother at her workplace to borrow money from her, since his spending the day before means the inheritance is no longer enough for a motorcycle. At the Weimar railway station, Peter runs into his former girlfriend, Uschi Röhle, the daughter of his former principal. She is on her way to Jena, where she is studying, and he follows her. In the laboratory where she works, she asks him why he went out with her back then even though she was two years older, and immediately answers her own question: just to spite her father. Since she has also had a fight with her current boyfriend, a young man with a doctorate, she goes with Peter that evening to a lecture at the planetarium. Back home, he looks through the papers and pictures kept on his father’s desk. There he finds a document proving that he was adopted by his parents. His mother tries to explain how he was found after the war in a ruin, half-starved, and that in her eyes he had always been her own child. But even her offer to give him the rest of the money for the motorcycle cannot make him feel kindly toward her. He leaves the house. As Peter wanders through the streets, completely confused, he comes across Anne, who is on her way to school. She sees that something is wrong and wants to help him by getting him a job with her father, who manages an MTS. But her father refuses, even though his tractor drivers are quitting and want to join the LPG. Anne takes Peter to a half-ruined shepherd’s building on the former estate, which once belonged to a baron. He is to find accommodation there for the time being. He wants to study for his Abitur there, and Anne gives him every kind of support. But he does not want to think about being in love with her, since he is still in love with Uschi. Anne brings him food every day, new schoolbooks, and quizzes him. To relax, they regularly go for walks around the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial site on Ettersberg, and gradually grow closer. Her father, too, realizes how useful Peter could be at the MTS, since the tractor drivers would rather move to the LPG, and so Peter is put to work driving a tractor and doing repairs. But this comes with discussions in which Comrade MTS chairman tries to convince Peter of the GDR’s good side, without success. Meanwhile, Anne persuades her school’s FDJ group to let Peter Naumann attend classes again. He therefore visits Principal Röhle to apply for readmission to school. But the principal sticks to his entrenched view of Peter as an enemy of the Republic and rejects the application. Peter and his friends decide to teach the principal a lesson, which he is to receive in the ruins of the Hall of the People’s Community. But the planned punishment gets out of hand, and Peter has to help his former principal. His friends then beat Peter up instead. This leads to a conversation between the two of them, and since Peter has learned something today, he also goes to his mother to make peace with her. Then he goes to the village inn, knowing that Anne and her father are attending an event there. Since her father will not speak with him, Peter goes up on stage to explain what he wants. He wants to live with Anne, which her father does not understand, but Anne agrees to it.