Der namenlose Tag (2017)

Chief Inspector Jakob Franck has often had to deliver news of a death to the bereaved. After retiring, he hopes to leave that life behind. But the past soon catches up with him: Ludwig Winther, whose wife Doris has just hanged herself because she could not come to terms with the death of their daughter Esther, blames the inspector in part for her death. When Franck was still working as an investigator, he had been unable to solve the death of seventeen-year-old Esther Winther. She was found hanged from a tree in the city park two years earlier. At the time, there were no serious signs of foul play, but neither was there any obvious reason for suicide. Winther’s despair prompts Franck to take another look at the case. Based on clues from the time, there had been suspicions about a neighbor, dentist Dr. Jordan, but they could not be substantiated. Esther, meanwhile, had recently become involved in the Goth scene and was preoccupied with death and transience, as well as the self-presentation that arose from this. After Franck speaks with one of Esther’s friends and finds a handwritten note from Esther’s mother at Winther’s house, addressed to her husband and reading, “I don’t want to see you anymore,” Franck has to consider the possibility that Ludwig Winther may have abused his daughter. The inspector therefore visits Doris Winther’s sister to get a clearer picture. Inge Nemetzki lives in Berlin and says that her niece often came to see her, but always alone. She cannot imagine her brother-in-law sexually abusing Esther and does not think it likely; she would have noticed during her conversations with Esther. As Franck tries to reconstruct the period before Esther’s death, he also questions her friend, whom he somewhat reproaches for possibly having let Esther down when she needed her most. Franck brings up Esther’s unusually frequent visits to Dr. Jordan and learns that she had gone to her neighbor’s so often because of Jordan’s son, Patrick. She liked the boy and saw him as the younger brother she herself had never had. Her father had never abused her either. There had nevertheless been rumors, which Esther’s mother had believed more than she believed her husband. Only later did she learn that the accusations against her husband had been fabricated, and so she felt partly responsible for the destruction of her family. Franck now visits Dr. Jordan last. Jordan tells him that Patrick is not his son but his nephew, whom he adopted after his brother was sent to prison for murdering Patrick’s mother. At the age of five, the boy had witnessed his mother’s death. Patrick notices Franck’s visit and that he has been asking about Esther. He follows the inspector and speaks to him in the street. He tells him that he saw everything: he had gone with Esther to the city park. She wanted to show him how to scare people. For this, she had deliberately made a loop in the rope that supposedly could not be pulled tight, so that you would only be “swinging from the rope.” Then Esther climbed the tree with the rope around her neck and slipped. Because a knot at the end of the rope caught in the fork of a branch, Esther broke her neck despite the noose being open. Franck tells Winther that Esther’s death was, after all, just a tragic accident and that no one was directly to blame.