Die Auferstehung (2018)

Linda and her husband Fred ring the doorbell at her father’s house in Ulm. He is an 89-year-old professor emeritus of orthopedics with Parkinson’s disease. Worried because they have been unable to reach him by phone, they have come from Memmingen. His daughter no longer has a key, since her father had the locks changed. So Linda and Fred now force their way into the house through the patio door. Her father is lying on the living-room sofa, apparently having died while masturbating; the sex video is still playing. Despite her moral outrage, Linda herself puts his penis back in his trousers because her husband can’t find any gloves. Linda immediately focuses on the will and the inheritance. To buy time, she closes the curtains—no one must realize that her father has died and that they are in the house. She calls her three brothers and gets them to come over. Meanwhile, they search the whole house for the will, but in vain. A note points to the lawyer Max Schmeler, the man Linda had jilted shortly before they were to marry. The brothers arrive one after another. First there is Joschi, the perpetual revolutionary, who stands triumphantly before their father with his Red Front fist raised. A radical critic of capitalism, he once illegally speculated with student union funds, which landed him in prison and led the family to spend their mother’s inheritance. Now he lives without a pension in a basement apartment in Heidelberg (which he calls a garden-level apartment). Then there is Jakob, who has come from Paris, where he is making a film report about Blaise Pascal. He would have loved to become a great film director, a second Ingmar Bergman. Now he scrapes by making television segments. At least his intellectual, cosmopolitan manner impresses Franziska, the wife of the youngest son, Uli—also because he puts into perspective the bits of philosophical knowledge picked up by Linda’s husband Fred, an adult-education philosophy teacher in Memmingen. Later, Franziska is even willing to seduce Jakob in the kitchen, but it comes to nothing because, under the circumstances, Jakob is impotent. Uli, who has two children with Franziska, is deeply distressed that his wife wants to leave him. He, too, has not got far after dropping out of medical school. The siblings are nervous. They all need the inheritance. Although Linda claims otherwise—as director of the Arthouse Memmingen, which gets only a few visitors a day, yet with a large house and lifestyle—she is the one who loses her composure most, because the inheritance seems to be at risk. Their father had a Hungarian caregiver, Anna, who not only kept house but also catered to his erotic needs. Linda is especially outraged by this (“the Hungarian whore”). It is considered certain that their father has already transferred the holiday home in Arona to Anna. Their father’s car, a Citroën DS, is also gone. They have summoned the lawyer Max Schmeler to get hold of the will. He arrives late that evening, but brings no clarity: opening wills is a matter for the probate court. He is unwilling to do anything “underhanded,” even when Linda brings herself to ask him. Only now does her husband Fred, who cannot control his drinking, learn that Linda and Max Schmeler once planned to marry. Upset and at odds with one another, they go to sleep in their former bedrooms, just as they did when they were children. When Jakob is about to drive back to Paris after all, he notices that the sofa in the living room is empty. Their father is not dead; he has got up and gone to the pool. Jakob alerts all his siblings, who bring their silent father back into the house and then sit around him in shock. He only comes fully back to life when Anna, who has been informed of his death by Max Schmeler, enters the room. The siblings have no choice but to pack their things and disappear back to where they came from. Anna has resumed her duties.