Es ist nicht vorbei (2011)

Jochen Weber is a personnel officer at a hospital in Koblenz. His wife, Carola, who grew up in Leipzig, teaches music at a school. She had to give up her intended career as a pianist after losing two fingers on her right hand in what she said was a harvesting accident. She is also infertile, which is why the couple have applied to adopt a child. Jochen learns the truth about his wife’s past, to whom he has been married for ten years, when he hires Professor Wolfgang Limberg, originally from Chemnitz, as head physician of the hospital’s neurology department. Limberg and his wife invite the Webers to a private dinner, but they leave shortly afterward because Carola says she is feeling unwell. In fact, she believes she has recognized Limberg by his voice as the doctor whose face she never knew, and who had treated her against her will with psychotropic drugs during her imprisonment at Hoheneck women’s prison. When Carola confronts Limberg at the clinic the next day and tells him her suspicions outright, he denies ever having worked at Hoheneck. He confides in Jochen, suggesting that Carola may have a mental disorder because she is unable to process her experiences at Hoheneck. Jochen confronts his wife, and she reveals that she was imprisoned in the late 1980s for attempting to flee the country. Her fingers were not lost in a harvesting accident at all: Limberg had declared her fit for work, and while under the influence of the drugs, which were intoxicating and sedating, she got her hand caught in a machine. Since Jochen considers the new head physician an upright man, he finds it difficult to believe his wife and now also suspects that she may be mentally ill. Nevertheless, Carola travels to Chemnitz to the office of the Birthler Authority. She does not get the real name of the doctor responsible at the time, as she had hoped—his code name was “IM Tim”—but at least she learns the name of his case officer: Horst Weihe. Carola immediately goes to see Weihe, but he claims not to know any “IM Tim,” and says the name Limberg is unfamiliar to him as well. Carola tries a trick, giving Weihe a phone number where he can supposedly reach Limberg. As soon as she leaves, her cell phone rings. She had given Weihe her own number, and he has immediately tried to contact Limberg. An employee at the Birthler Authority also gives Carola a lead on Renate Förster, who was likewise imprisoned at Hoheneck and now gives tours of the former prison. Carola steels herself and goes to Hoheneck, where Förster shows her several photos taken during Carola’s imprisonment. She does indeed recognize Limberg in one of them. When Carola shows him the picture, he again denies all the accusations and claims he was in Cuba at the time. However, Limberg’s daughter tells her that although her father had been in Cuba, he had to cut his stay short because of hepatitis and return to East Germany. Meanwhile, the youth welfare office has learned that Carola was imprisoned and received inpatient treatment for mental disorders in the early 1990s. She had concealed both facts at the time, so the adoption application is rejected. Believing Limberg to be the driving force behind this, Carola reports him to the medical association. But Limberg says he has already requested access to his file from the Birthler Authority, and also cites a report by a respected specialist who diagnosed Carola with psychosis in 1991. The association clears him of all accusations. Jochen, who was present when Limberg was questioned and is now learning ever more details about his wife’s past, grows increasingly emotionally estranged from Carola, leaves their marital home, and moves in with his sister Anne. Limberg, in turn, obtains an injunction barring Carola from approaching his family. A few days later, Carola wakes in the morning after a nightmare, with the window open, and discovers a puncture mark on her arm and that some of the documents from the Birthler Authority have been stolen. She returns to Chemnitz and learns of a recording of a conversation between “IM Tim” and Weihe. She receives it on a CD. Limberg, who has by now also learned that the recording exists and has followed Carola, meets Weihe outside the authority’s office. It emerges that Weihe had provided Limberg with the 1991 report. Limberg demands that Weihe have the recording destroyed, but has to suspect that Carola already has it. On the drive home at night, shortly after leaving the motorway, Limberg forces Carola off the road, and her car crashes into a tree. As Limberg tries to take the CD, another driver interrupts him. Carola is admitted to her husband’s hospital and given a private room. Limberg visits her there, admits that he recognized her immediately at the dinner invitation, and tries to inject her with a fatal potassium chloride solution. Just before the crash, Carola had left her husband a message on his voicemail about evidence against Limberg; Jochen had also already begun to doubt Limberg’s integrity as a result of his own inquiries. Having now been informed of his wife’s accident, Jochen arrives in time and prevents Limberg from killing Carola. Limberg submits to arrest without resistance.