Der Maulkorb (1938)

In a small Rhenish town during the imperial era, the residents are outraged by their sovereign. He has given a speech that is printed in the local paper. In it, the sovereign has, among other things, harshly rebuked his critics: “I am happy to listen to my duly appointed advisers. But for know-it-alls and troublemakers, I have only the great Goethe saying,” is how the paper quotes him. The “great Goethe saying” in particular causes discontent among the regulars at the tavern run by Frau Tigges. The prosecutor, von Traskow, is among them; he drinks himself into a stupor over the course of the evening and is the last to leave the tavern, accompanied by his dog. The next morning, the sovereign’s statue is wearing a muzzle. The hungover prosecutor, von Traskow, is assigned the case. An investigation is opened for lèse-majesté, and a reward of 300 marks is offered for information. Before long, the young painter Rabanus emerges as an unwilling witness who saw the act. He gives an official an exact description of the culprit, but after an outburst of laughter, he tells von Traskow the exact opposite. For none other than the prosecutor himself had tampered with the statue while dead drunk that night. The prosecutor’s family has long since realized the truth and covered up the traces—and Rabanus has fallen in love with von Traskow’s daughter, Trude. The prosecutor knows nothing of this. After Rabanus makes an anonymous call to the police station, the reward is raised from 300 to 3,000 marks. Rabanus, now willing to do anything to save the honor of the von Traskows, persuades a friend at a carnival party to pose as the culprit. But when the police are summoned, the friend denies all responsibility, and Rabanus is ultimately arrested for incitement to make a false statement, especially since his contradictory statements during the initial questioning have made him look suspicious. When a woman comes to the station and says she saw the culprit leave Frau Tigges’s tavern last, von Traskow believes he has reached his goal. But while questioning the landlady, he realizes that he was the last guest—and therefore must also have been the culprit. Desperate, he goes home and confesses the deed to his wife. However, as he is about to explain the situation to the chief prosecutor, the two day laborers Bätes and Wimm arrive at the station. Bätes claims to be the culprit and Wimm the witness to the deed—but both are only after the reward, which they intend to share. The case goes to trial, where the defendant Bätes in particular gets tangled up in contradictions and denies the deed out of fear of a long prison sentence. When Rabanus is questioned again about his strange testimony at the start of the investigation, he proposes a possible scenario: What if the culprit, in a drunken stupor, had not realized that he was defiling the statue of the Father of the Country? Bätes picks up on this suggestion and says that he had taken the statue for one of Goethe. He is therefore sentenced only to a small fine for gross disorderly conduct, which he has already served through his time in pretrial detention. Rabanus can now finally declare his love for Trude openly. The chief prosecutor, who seems to be in the know about what really happened, tells von Traskow in the end that he will have him transferred to Allenstein in East Prussia as chief prosecutor.