Im Reservat (1973)

A house in a Berlin redevelopment area is slated for demolition. Most of the residents have already moved out. The caretaker’s family and the elderly Mrs. Minkwitz remain. Despite an eviction order, the old woman refuses to leave her apartment. Her subtenant, Alfred Bergmann, who lives there with her and helps with everyday errands, supports her, partly because Bergmann would also have to look for a new place to live. He is a gay cross-dresser who also performs at gay venues, and he fears he will have to search for a long time to find another landlord as tolerant as Mrs. Minkwitz, who supports his “being different,” among other things by giving him her old clothes. The unlikely pair defend their “sanctuary” with desperate defiance against the property management. Even when her daughter, who has come from Hamburg, urges her mother to leave the apartment in accordance with the authorities’ wishes and shows her a newly built residential area as well as a retirement home, Mrs. Minkwitz coolly refuses. An attempt to have her declared legally incompetent is unsuccessful. The daughter then begins emptying the apartment on her own authority. But that, too, has no effect, and the daughter leaves again, resigned. Bergmann and Minkwitz return to the emptied apartment.