Die vertauschte Königin (1984)

In a castle lives a perpetually bad-tempered queen who tyrannically keeps her servants in line, hands down inhuman sentences at random, and treats only her court jester, Bartholomew, with any degree of humanity. When she sees her maid Marie’s beautiful long hair, she has it cut off and made into a wig for herself. Gunner Jörg has to wake her every morning with a cannon shot, but when he addresses her without the respect due to her and fires a second shot after the first, she orders that he be hanged that evening. Jörg owes his escape from death to Bartholomew’s intervention, and instead receives daily lashes. He must also retrieve the second cannonball. He goes to the village blacksmith, whose duck pond is where the ball lands every morning, and gets back the life-saving cannonball. He also meets the blacksmith Hanne, who, to his amazement, looks exactly like the queen. That evening, Jörg and Bartholomew plot together: during the night, Hanne is to be secretly switched with the queen and rule in her place for a few days. The switch succeeds without anyone noticing, and the next day the queen wakes up in the blacksmith’s workshop while Hanne is lying in the bed at the royal castle. The blacksmith does not realize that he is not dealing with his wife, and is bewildered and increasingly horrified as his wife acts like a madwoman, calls herself a queen, rejects all affection, and refuses to prepare any food. In the evening, she scrubs his back only reluctantly, and the food she does prepare is inedible. Hanne, meanwhile, gets over her brief confusion and starts ruling: she abolishes the queen’s despotic laws and mingles with her subjects. In the kitchen, she tastes all the dishes and holds a grand celebration that evening, attended by everyone in the castle. She has already managed to get Bartholomew to reveal his trick, so she is not surprised when the obsequious court marshal tells her that he has arrested a double. The queen had earlier broken into the castle and, after briefly resisting, was thrown into the dungeon. Jörg is guarding her there. The blacksmith has also followed the woman he believes to be his wife and frees her, but Jörg finally sets him straight. As the queen hurries off to her bedroom, the blacksmith finds Hanne on the throne and embraces her. Together, they take one more quick look in on the queen in her bedroom, then leave. The next morning, the queen wakes up again in her familiar bedroom. She is tearful because she was woken by a cannon shot that now seems far too loud to her. Whimpering and meek, she tells Bartholomew about her terrible nightmare, in which she thought she was in hell, and goes back to sleep.