Ihr Fehltritt (1923)

The beautiful Dagny and the young engineer Reiter are planning their wedding. When an accident occurs at the lime works where Reiter is employed, he is immediately torn away from his fiancée and summoned to his workplace. An explosion has caused deep cracks to appear in the works’ tallest chimney. Reiter is supposed to assess the damage, but before he can submit his expert opinion, the massive structure collapses and buries him beneath it. Reiter is pulled free with a severe head injury. Dagny begs the eminent surgeon Biking to save Reiter’s life. Biking is known as a notorious womanizer who, predictably, had already set his sights on young Dagny. He agrees to perform the life-saving operation, but only on condition that Dagny promise to become his afterward. Heavy-hearted, the young woman agrees. Under anesthesia, Reiter experiences truly nightmarish visions on a Hoffmannian scale: before his subconscious mind, he sees Biking summon Dagny to him and take what he could not obtain willingly. In utter despair, Dagny then takes her own life with poison. She dies in the arms of the detested rival—the surgeon. Reiter resolves to avenge Dagny’s terrible death. He pursues the villain and intends to shoot him with a revolver, when Reiter suddenly collapses and dies of a heart attack. But Biking’s triumph soon turns into a nightmare. Racked with guilt, the doctor begins to hallucinate, grows increasingly paranoid, and finally sees himself surrounded by several skeletons. He shoots at these bony demons, which exist only in his imagination, and tries to flee. In the process, Professor Biking falls from a window to the ground below and lies shattered in the street. Then at last, engineer Reiter wakes up: all these events during the anesthesia were merely a nightmare born of feverish delirium.