Die Glasbläserin (2016)

1891. Sisters Johanna and Marie Steinmann live with their father in Lauscha. Since their mother’s death, they have kept house for him; he is the sole breadwinner, and all three live on the meager income from the glassblowing business he runs. After his sudden death, the sisters fall into severe financial difficulties. Marie is willing to carry on their father’s craft, but Johanna objects. Women are forbidden to do this kind of independent work. When the neighboring glassblower Wilhelm Heimer offers the young women jobs, they initially accept. Marie is allowed to paint the glassware, and proves very skilled at it. Johanna, by contrast, is more interested in making the glass itself, but both sisters are deeply dissatisfied. The pay is poor, and their employer’s son, Thomas, makes advances to Marie. One day, Johanna expresses her opinion to Wilhelm Heimer about the highly authoritarian way he runs his business, and her employment ends as a result. She takes a job with the merchant Friedhelm Strobel in nearby Sonneberg. Although this means she is away all week, she now has suitable work that pays better. She becomes Strobel’s “right-hand woman” and also comes into contact with influential customers. When one of them happens to want to buy a bowl that Marie recently painted in her own design, a new market opens up. Johanna asks Marie to make more bowls like it so that Strobel can add them to his inventory. But Marie has other worries at first: she has to marry Thomas Heimer because she is expecting his child. He had taken advantage of Johanna’s absence from the family home to rape Marie. The marriage thus gets off to a bad start, and when the baby is born and turns out to be “only” a girl, it puts the young couple’s relationship to a further test. Alongside her new marital duties, Marie repeatedly manages to carve out some time to practice glassblowing in secret in her father’s workshop. She gets better and better at making the bowls she has designed herself, which Johanna sells very successfully in Sonneberg. Marie also develops novel glass baubles, which she initially uses as mobiles to soothe her baby. Marie’s constant absence from the Heimer household eventually leads her to leave her husband after another argument and return to the family home for good. Johanna thinks this is wrong, but by this point she too is suffering at the hands of her employer. One day Strobel, who appears so respectable in public, takes advantage of an opportunity and rapes Johanna. She too leaves her well-paid job and flees to Marie. On the way, the glass-eye maker Peter Maienbaum finds the completely distraught young woman in the woods. Traumatized, Johanna only slowly finds her way back to normal life. When Marie learns that the American wholesaler who had liked her bowl so much is in Sonneberg, she gets in touch with him. Despite Strobel’s attempts to prevent it, she manages to arouse Mr. Miles’s interest. She convinces him of her abilities, and Miles is indeed extremely impressed. When he discovers the baubles Marie had actually made just for her baby, he is so enthusiastic that he orders 800 of these Christmas ornaments. Marie now has to produce that quantity under immense pressure, which angers her estranged husband, who sees her work as competition for his father’s production. Marie convinces Wilhelm Heimer that she makes entirely different things from him and is not trying to take his customers away. They make peace, allowing Marie to finish the order on time without interference. Among the boxes being shipped to America, she places a red glass heart she has made herself. In response, Miles orders 1,500 of these hearts from Marie, securing her financial future. With his help, Marie is confident she can take the step into self-employment. Johanna, too, gradually begins to look to the future with confidence, and after Peter Maienbaum’s long courtship, she has decided to be with him.