Die Ortliebschen Frauen (1981)

The Ortlieb women are chiefly mother Helene Ortlieb and her two daughters, Josefine and Anna, whom the family’s recently deceased patriarch, Ortlieb, leaves in a state of great mental confusion. This is apparent from the very beginning of the story, when the three Ortlieb women return from the funeral and fumble nervously and in distress with the door lock because it will not open straight away. Once they finally get into the apartment, they immediately seek the protection of darkness. The three Ortlieb women and son Walter feel they urgently need this protection, because the bereaved family members instinctively sense that their father’s—or husband’s—death threatens to crumble the family ties, long since fragile, once and for all. Helene Ortlieb is like a fragile elf: incapable of managing life, erratic, somewhat eccentric, and as if she did not belong to this world. After her husband’s death, she retreats into helplessness and feigned confusion that suggests senile dementia. Her son Walter, a solitary musician with a deformed foot, lives in his own little world and, because of his disability, could be described as shy, almost timid. The younger daughter Anna is also rather introverted and directs all her loving care toward a bird. This leaves Josefine, the older Ortlieb daughter, feeling compelled to take charge. Practical and energetic, she tries to put the family’s affairs in order and, trapped in a constant state of control, protectiveness, and alarm, to keep anything that might even remotely be perceived as a threat away from the Ortliebs. In her eyes, the enemy is everywhere: in the form of a birdseed seller who, much to Anna’s delight, approaches and courts her younger sister; and in the form of Walter’s tentative attempts to break free, which Josefine increasingly tries to regulate, justifying this by citing their frail mother’s well-being. It becomes ever clearer that Josefine’s frantic activism, which she justifies as a struggle to keep the family together, is also very much intended to compensate for her own fear of loss. While Anna gradually begins to submit to Josefine’s need for control, Walter, who works at a bank, continues trying to preserve his small freedoms. When Josefine learns that Walter has supposedly begun a relationship with a colleague, the sisters take the ultimate emergency measure and lock their own brother in the cellar of their home—to protect him, naturally—so they can shield him forever from the hostile world outside.