Gruppenbild mit Dame (1977)

Leni Gruyten is the self-assured daughter of a construction contractor. During the Nazi era, Leni has to cope with loss time and again, yet she clings to life and consistently holds on to a humanistic outlook. When Leni visits her cousin and friend Erhard Schweigert, who is stationed in Denmark as a soldier, he tells her that he intends to desert to Sweden, where she is to join him later. Because the plan is ill-conceived, it promptly fails, ending with Erhard being shot, as is Leni’s brother Heinrich, who accompanied him. Leni returns to Germany. Soon afterward, her mother Helene dies. Her father, Hubert, who had set up a sham company to harm the Nazis—as he defiantly declares—is sent to a concentration camp. Now on her own, Leni finds work at Walter Pelzer’s cemetery nursery, where she makes wreaths for fallen soldiers. There, she repeatedly stands up for Boris Koltowski, a Russian prisoner of war who is harassed and fears for his life more than once. Leni gets to know and falls in love with the intelligent, sensitive engineer, who has a good command of German and occasionally recites poetic verses by Trakl. Although they are both aware of the danger of being discovered, they cherish their moments alone together, which they are afforded especially when air-raid alarms send their coworkers fleeing to the nearest bunker—and Leni becomes pregnant. After the war, Boris and Leni are reunited, and Leni gives birth to a son. Once again, Walter Pelzer helps Leni, Boris, and Hubert Gruyten, who has meanwhile been released from the concentration camp, and hires them as workers. Because Boris has a passport in the name of Alfred Bullhorst, he is arrested by the American military police and taken into French captivity as a prisoner of war. He dies there in a mining accident. Leni’s father falls to his death in a construction-site accident. Leni struggles with being called a “Russian lover,” though people say it behind her back. In 1963, in the middle of winter, red roses lie on the grave of Alfred Bullhorst, placed there by the parents of a German soldier of that name; at the same time, red roses bloom on the grave of Rachel Maria Ginsburg, who died exactly 20 years earlier. Ginsburg was a nun and Leni’s idol, someone she had always been able to confide in. Sister Klementine asks Walter Pelzer for advice while Leni plays the piano in a neighboring apartment and afterward offers homemade cookies to her imaginary guests. News of the roses reaches the Vatican too, whereupon the nuns exhume and burn Rachel Maria Ginsburg’s remains. The nun, who came from a Jewish family, had been held captive in the convent and accused of corrupting schoolgirls. She died of hunger and cold in 1943.