Für zwei Groschen Zärtlichkeit (1957)

Somewhere in the East German countryside in the mid-1950s. On his nightly rounds, night watchman Dallmann catches draftsman Josef Hartlieb illicitly making out in his office with the young employee Eva Bernhardt. Hartlieb buys the man’s silence with a little money. The following morning, Eva has to fend off Dallmann’s advances in the corridor, whereupon the night watchman reports the previous night’s incident to the personnel manager. This leads to Eva’s immediate dismissal. Desperate, Eva turns to her lover Hartlieb, but he coldly brushes her off. She asks him to marry her, but he only laughs at her. Eva finds no support at home either. On the contrary: her mother lives with a younger man who is not Eva’s father, and one day he throws himself at Eva, trying to rape her. When her mother comes in, she steps between them and blames Eva for her lover’s misconduct. Suddenly without a job and now without a home, Eva remembers her old friend Marianne, who emigrated to Denmark and now lives in Copenhagen. Eva sets off for the Danish capital and, on the way, meets a friendly Danish long-haul truck driver named Hendrik Pedersen. He smuggles her, a woman without papers, across the German-Danish border near Flensburg, and the two get along immediately. They arrange to meet again the following Saturday at the Little Mermaid, the city’s world-famous landmark. Marianne’s address leads Eva to a certain Luigi Moretti, who, as the sign on the outside wall advertises, sells “fine ladies’ lingerie.” A number of girls who look like mannequins—what would nowadays be called models—mill about in the elegantly furnished studio. One of them is Marianne, though everyone here calls her “Ria.” Proudly, Ria shows her old friend Eva around. She hints that Eva, too, could enter this luxurious world and perhaps work as a mannequin. But Eva is reluctant to do as Ria does and model lingerie half-naked in front of wealthy men. Instinctively, she senses that it may be only a small step from fashion model to prostitute. So she tells Ria she wants to try her luck in another line of work first. Eva’s suspicions are right: the “mannequins” are actually call girls who can be hired by men for sexual services during their presentations and then visit those men at home. Moretti is the girls’ pimp. Eva cannot find legitimate work in Copenhagen because she has no papers, and Hendrik has not shown up at the Little Mermaid at the appointed time—his truck had broken down. So Eva bites the bullet and lets Ria persuade her to work for Moretti as a “mannequin.” But when Eva realizes that the job is to involve more than modeling lingerie for interested gentlemen, she rushes out of the studio in horror. In the end, however, her desperation is so great that she gives in. At least she meets a client, Mr. Larsen, who is very taken with her and treats her kindly, and Eva manages to persuade Moretti that she should serve only this customer. Her colleague Madeleine is the only one who suspects that Eva is ready to leave at any moment, since she cannot stand this life at all. Meanwhile, Hendrik Pedersen has turned half the city upside down trying to find Eva. By chance, one day he spots her in Ria’s car. Eva is afraid Hendrik might discover that she has since been driven by desperation to become a prostitute, and she responds awkwardly when the deeply infatuated truck driver questions her. She tells him she works as a mannequin in a lingerie factory. At their very next meeting, Hendrik wants to take Eva with him at once and put her up at his father’s house. He even talks about marriage. Overjoyed, Eva accepts the offer from the considerably older Dane. But an unexpected incident threatens to shatter her dreams. Her friend Ria has earned enough money to leave prostitution and open a little shop of her own. Moretti’s client Kostja is supposed to act as an intermediary for Ria in setting up the business, but he turns out to be a scoundrel and runs off with the purchase money she entrusted to him. Ria reports him to the police, who then get on the trail of Moretti’s real business. During a raid on Moretti’s upscale brothel, Eva, still without papers, is also caught up in the hands of the authorities: she had returned once more to bring money to the desperate Ria. Hendrik hears about it and is thunderstruck when he learns that Eva had recently worked as a prostitute. Outraged, he turns away from her. Madeleine, who knows Eva’s story, visits Hendrik and makes it clear that Eva is really an “innocent gone astray,” driven onto the wrong path only by desperation. Hendrik then goes looking for Eva, but he cannot find her.