Hungerjahre (1980)

Thirteen-year-old Ursula Scheuner is growing up as the only child of a lower-middle-class family in postwar Germany during the Adenauer era. As puberty takes hold, the girl increasingly comes into conflict with her parents and those around her. National Socialism robbed them of their youth. Now these people are trying to forget and make up for the years they lost. Ursula is confronted with her father’s political indecision and private lies, and with her mother’s ironclad determination to consume, her great pent-up desire to catch up on what she missed, and her fearful hostility toward sexuality. Her relationship with her mother weighs on Ursula more and more. Ursula never wants to become like this mother, who herself has never discovered what a female subject can be capable of and wants to shape her daughter in the image of her own ideal. Ursula feels a profound longing to escape this narrow, petit-bourgeois world and seeks refuge with her peers, but finds herself in dangerous situations. Her struggles for identity, self-protection, and recognition bring her to the limits of her emotional endurance. When the gap between her inner feelings and external circumstances becomes too great, all that remains is to retreat inward, into a speechlessness that numbs her emotions. Matters come to a head when she meets a young Black man and spends a night with him by a lake. When he tells her that he has to leave again the next morning, Ursula once more falls into a deep depression and does not know how she can go on living. The film tells the story of a girl who is supposed to grow up but does not know how.