Mord in Frankfurt (1968)

Set in Frankfurt am Main in 1967, the story has three narrative strands, all revolving around the subject of murder—both individual murder and industrial-scale genocide—and the German public’s response to, or handling of, these crimes in the late 1960s. At the center of the story is Andrej Markovski, a Polish doctor. In the summer of 1967, he travels from Warsaw to Frankfurt am Main, where he intends to testify in a historic trial. Two German escorts meet him at the airport and take him to his hotel. At the German government’s expense, he is given a comfortable room, where a welcome letter from the city’s mayor is already waiting for him. Markovski’s testimony is very important to one of the last Auschwitz trials, which is currently under way in the city, even though, unlike during the earlier trials (1963 to 1965), the German public has little interest in this late-stage proceeding. No one wants to hear the very personal story of Polish Holocaust survivor Markovski anymore; German indifference is evident everywhere in small gestures. At the end of the film, it becomes clear that Markovski was subjected to scornful and aggressive attacks by the defendant and his defense attorney, who pelt the witness with a barrage of lies and insinuations. Deeply shocked by such despicable behavior, Markovski is unable to finish his testimony and finally leaves the city in haste for home, bitter and disappointed. At the same time as Markovski, the blonde flight attendant Franziska Körner arrives at the airport. She takes a taxi into the city to spend her two days off with her boyfriend, Hans, an actor, before her next assignment. Their relationship is not without tension. Hans is currently rehearsing Peter Weiss’s play The Investigation, a drama about the Auschwitz trials then taking place. Unlike Franziska, who is quite clearly overwhelmed by the subject and thinks she can see a great deal of arrogant “posturing” behind The Investigation’s critical ambition, the committed artist Hans is driven by a desire to use this play, which matters so much to him, to make things better in Germany. During a rehearsal at the Frankfurt theater, the actors and the director have an intense discussion about how difficult it is to get the audience to “think and recognize” its own entanglements as well. But the idea that emerges—to “hold up a mirror” to the audience—fails: looking in the mirror only becomes an exercise in self-reflection. The taxi driver who drove Franziska is murdered shortly afterward. This is not the first act of violence against a Frankfurt taxi driver; the crime is part of a series of earlier taxi-driver murders. The news sends his shocked colleagues into a rage. Since the police apparently can no longer ensure public safety and seem unable to make progress with their investigation, the resourceful transport operators want to take matters into their own hands. Their first step is a funeral convoy and a wildcat strike, through which their own anger and helplessness find an outlet. These murders affect the local people far more than the Holocaust genocides being addressed in the trial, which took place just over two decades earlier. Among the taxi-driver demonstrators, calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty ring out …