Der Ärgermacher (2003)

The equally unsuccessful and fame-hungry writer Jochen Antrazith steals Franz Kafka’s remains to force the federal government to print 150,000 copies of his novel “Note 6.” He repeatedly commits spectacular crimes, not to enrich himself but to attract public attention. During one of these stunts—a robbery at the Sony Center in Berlin, where Jochen forces Sony employees to steal their own merchandise and record it with a video camera—he meets Ester Vilar, a beautiful Czech woman, and falls in love with her. When Franz Kafka’s bones are handed over to the police—some of them having been ground into bone meal by a Berlin artist couple and inhaled as a recreational substance—literary authority Marcel Reich-Ranicki denounces Antrazith’s novel as a school essay. Then, when Ester also refuses Jochen’s love, the humiliated man takes measures to strike the Germans at their very core. The “Siddharta” special commission, formed in the meantime and led by Commissioner Kosack and his colleague Bousdokous, tries to stop him. In a desperate hunt, they and the TV investigators from Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst plead with the German public to help catch the talentless perpetrator. Shortly before the national team’s decisive World Cup final against England at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, he kidnaps its captain, Stefan Effenberg, and places an explosive belt around his head. The police eventually manage to free Effenberg before it detonates. During the operation, Jochen Antrazith is killed by a shot from a special forces officer.