Die Unberührbare (2000)

Autumn 1989: On television, images of the fall of the Berlin Wall are showing while the writer Hanna Flanders talks on the phone in her Munich apartment with the playwright Ronald and announces that she is going to kill herself with arsenic. They both decide to smoke one more cigarette, and Ronald manages to persuade Hanna to put down the bottle of arsenic. The news of the Wall’s fall has further shaken Hanna’s already fragile psyche: she is addicted to nicotine and pills and can no longer sleep. Now she also feels the burden of no longer being published, since the GDR was the only country where her books were still in print. The utopia of putting Lenin’s ideas into practice in West Germany has remained a utopia with the fall of the Wall. She decides to move to Berlin. The move consumes most of her savings, and she spends another large sum on a Dior coat. Her first stop in Berlin is to visit her son, who reacts aggressively when Hanna smokes in his apartment, since he gave up smoking after the fall of the Wall. She cannot share his enthusiasm for Berlin and also asks him about drugs. Her underlying contempt for his writing angers him, and she leaves. Hanna moves into the Hotel Excelsior and spends the night with a male prostitute, unsure how to behave toward him. The next day she goes to see her publisher, who is celebrating with friends in a half-drunk state and tells Hanna that he can no longer publish her work. Her furniture from Munich has still not arrived. Hanna has almost no money left, and the resourceful Grete puts her up in the publishing house’s writers’ apartment, in a housing estate on the outskirts of the city. The apartment is so run-down that Hanna escapes to a bar for the night. There is a celebration there too, and a drunk teacher approaches Hanna. He says he has read all her works and discussed some of them in class. When he gets forward with her, Hanna rebuffs him, and she is insulted and threatened. The people in the bar come to her aid. Hanna flees and, the next morning, arrives at a snack stand in tears. A young woman who was at the bar the night before takes her in with her family. For the first time, Hanna is able to sleep, and she also takes off her black wig. When she wakes, she joins the family, but realizes they do not understand her grief over the fall of the Wall. After a brief phone call with Ronald, she leaves Berlin. First she goes to her parents, asking them for money. Her mother is hostile toward her, while her father is understanding but cannot stand up to her mother. With 500 marks from her father, she leaves and meets her first husband, Bruno, at the train station. He raised the son they had together from that marriage on his own. He persuades her to go with him to Darmstadt, and she spends the night at his place. It becomes clear that he too has never been able to overcome a deep trauma—the death by fire of a woman he loved—and has become a drinker. Hanna leaves him after that one night and goes to Munich. In her old apartment she finds everything untouched. The furniture is still on its way, and she sleeps on the belongings she always carries with her in a travel bag. The next morning she tries to return the Dior coat she bought, but the store refuses to take it back. Hanna gets drunk in a bar and eventually collapses in the street. She wakes up in a hospital, where she is told she must go through nicotine withdrawal, or she will develop smoker’s leg, which will have to be amputated. Along with nicotine withdrawal, which does not guarantee that her leg can be saved, Hanna must undergo detoxification to get off the pills. She realizes that cigarettes are the only thing in her life she truly likes. Even one last visit from Ronald at the detox clinic, before he leaves for Vienna to stage one of his plays, offers her no comfort. She secretly smokes one last cigarette in the clinic bathroom and then throws herself out of the window.