Kaltgestellt (1980)

West Berlin, late 1970s. Vocational-school teacher Brasch tries to talk things through with his wife Juliane on the outskirts of a demonstration in Kreuzberg. Juliane has left him and moved into a left-wing commune. She threatens to take their daughter Anna to live with her soon. At the demonstration, a West German intelligence agent named Körner photographs young men handing out counterfeit copies of the Bild newspaper. The agent and his handler, Sokolowski, are in turn photographed by the young photographer Franziska Schwarz. Despite her German name, Franziska Schwarz is Spanish; she actually lives in Paris and wants to photograph a political report in Berlin. She notices the attractive Brasch and takes his picture too. The next day, one of Brasch’s students commits suicide. He had been spying on his classmates as an informant. Körner now seeks Brasch out, wanting him to keep sounding out the students for the intelligence service. In return, he promises information about the teacher’s wife, who lives in the commune. Brasch is outraged by Körner’s proposal and goes public with the compromising records left by the student who died by suicide. But instead of causing a scandal, this gets him suspended from teaching. Körner is also dismissed and threatens Brasch with revenge. He makes sure Brasch loses his apartment and that Anna is handed over to her mother by the youth welfare office. Brasch then takes to drinking and begins an affair with Franziska. The photographer shows him the pictures she took at the demonstration of Körner and his superior, Sokolowski. Soon afterward, Körner breaks into Franziska’s place and steals the incriminating photographs. Desperate, Brasch now pursues Körner on foot through the city. At Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, the agent hands the teacher his dossiers, along with Franziska’s photographs and negatives. He tells Brasch to use them to stir up a scandal. Then he escapes to East Berlin by S-Bahn. Brasch now tries to set things right through a clandestine conversation with Berlin’s senator for the interior in an underground station. During the conversation, however, the police try to arrest the teacher. Brasch is shot while fleeing and makes it onto a subway train. In the final scene, he is seen limping, bleeding, through an underpass at the airport. Whether he can still meet Franziska, who was planning to take a flight to Paris, remains unclear.