Der Engel mit dem Saitenspiel (1944)

New Year’s Eve 1938 in the Alps: After a bitter quarrel with his girlfriend, opera singer Vera Schellhorn, piano maker Gustav (“Gustl”) Strengholt heads alone to a remote mountain hut. There he meets a young woman. Although they argue at first, they spend New Year’s Eve together and eventually spend the night together. The next morning, despite having even kept their names from each other, they set off for Innsbruck together, in love. Gustav still has to collect his luggage from the hotel. The young woman is carrying a carved “Angel with the Stringed Instrument,” which Gustav bought from a woodcarver and gave to her. At the railway station, they miss each other. Months later, Susanne—the young woman’s name—is living alone in Munich. She earns money doing odd jobs at the antique shop of Dr. Thomas Weinzierl, who is in love with her and would like to marry her. Susanne, however, lives in the memory of the man from the mountain hut, especially when she learns she is pregnant by him. She sells Thomas the angel figurine, which he displays in his shop as not for sale. A year later, Susanne is the mother of a boy and a permanent employee of Thomas’s. Both he and the architect Bernhard Zoller court her, but she turns down both men’s proposals. What she does not know is that Gustav is the best friend of Bernhard and Thomas, but is temporarily in the United States. After his return, he wants to put the past behind him and plans to get engaged to Vera, who now comes into Thomas’s shop and asks Susanne for a special gift for her fiancé. Susanne sells her the angel figurine. Gustav recognizes the angel immediately and goes to the antique shop, where he finally sees Susanne again. She is just talking with Dr. Thomas, who—to her surprise—introduces her as his bride. Shocked, Gustav sticks to his plan to get engaged to Vera, but at his engagement party Susanne tells him that she has his child. Gustav puts his life in order and marries Susanne. But she no longer believes in Gustav’s love and says that, after all this time, her main concern is to give her son his father’s surname, so she files for divorce shortly after the wedding. Above all, she does not want to take Vera’s intended husband away from her. Vera, however, realizes that Susanne and Gustav truly love each other. When Gustav, driven away by his wife’s coldness, returns to the ski hut in the Alps, Susanne overcomes her pride and follows him. They recreate the moment of their first reunion, but with their roles reversed, since Gustav is now the first to arrive at the hut. They realize that they had both been at the railway station back then, but had waited for each other at different stations. When the postilion announces the New Year, they finally fall into each other’s arms.