Mein alter Freund Fritz (2007)

The successful, self-assured surgeon Professor Harry Seidel is convinced that good medicine and economic considerations are mutually exclusive. His professional competence is unquestioned, but many people—above all, personnel director Manfred Zach—accuse him of being cold and selfish. Lydia, Harry’s wife, is being courted by Jim, a fellow photographer. After twenty years of marriage, Lydia says, she simply isn’t that interested in Harry anymore, and she doesn’t turn Jim down. A nearly fatal car accident throws Harry’s life and worldview into disarray. He isn’t ready to die after the accident and unwittingly brings his friend Fritz, who died more than twenty years ago, back to the world of the living, where only Harry can see him. However, Harry argues with Fritz in front of everyone. Rather than hiding his friend, he quarrels loudly with him in front of his colleagues and family. He is ultimately deemed mentally incompetent. Zach wants to remove him from his post, but Seidel wins the exchange between the chief physician and the personnel director in front of the assembled doctors. Zach is defeated. Harry’s visions of Fritz are finally revealed as the personification of an unresolved crisis of conscience: out of cowardice, Harry had not told Fritz about his illness and had also cowardly stayed away when his friend was dying. The conflict and its disturbing effects on those around Harry force him to find new priorities. While his wife Lydia has nearly given in to Jim’s advances, Harry has kissed the young nurse Cora. But Fritz once again opens Harry’s eyes to the beauty of his wife Lydia and the value of his partnership and family, and Harry returns to her, just as she returns to him. Their marriage has overcome its stagnant phase. Professor Seidel’s visions have the effect of earning him a reputation among patients as a “miracle doctor.” Patients flock to the clinic, its profitability rises, and the professor and his quirk become a cash cow. The final scene breaks through the “fourth wall” of the imagined stage space: the nurse addresses the audience and explains how Professor Seidel’s visions of Fritz came to an end. Fritz disappeared at the very moment the professor delivered a new baby in an emergency birth in a taxi. In the end, the doctor is even praised by the minister-president (played by Christian Wulff).