Novemberkind (2008)

Malchow, Mecklenburg, November 2007: Inga, in her early twenties and the owner of a small lending library, lives alone. She regularly visits her grandparents, who raised her. She has been told that her mother drowned in the Baltic Sea. Inga has no memory of her. Nobody knows anything about her father. In Konstanz, literature professor Robert says goodbye to his girlfriend Claire, who is trying to stop him from making the trip—he has only just survived a heart attack. He wants to go to Malchow to find Inga. He meets her in her lending library and gains her trust. He tells her that, while he was a literature lecturer in Konstanz, he had an auditing student who had fled East Germany. Her name was Anne, and in 1980 she had left her not-quite-six-month-old child with the grandparents in Malchow. She had fled with Juri, a Russian deserter. Inga realizes this is her mother’s story. She is furious with Robert, who has suddenly upended her orderly life, and with the villagers, all of whom knew that her mother had fled. Even her best friend Steffi, it turns out, had kept it from her. Inga sets off with Robert for Konstanz to find Anne. On the way, they learn that Juri now lives at Stuttgart’s old freight station. He recognizes Inga because she looks so much like her mother, but turns her away when she offers him money for information about Anne’s whereabouts. They talk only the next day, when Juri tells her that he and Anne had tried to bring Inga to them after their escape, but it had proved impossible. Anne had also soon left him and returned to Alexander, the man who had helped them both escape. She and Alexander had been a couple in Malchow before he fled to the West with his family. Alexander was also Inga’s father. He lives in Konstanz and works as a doctor. Inga and Robert travel to Konstanz. What Inga does not know is that Robert is closely following her every move because he plans to turn her story into his novel, November Child. He secretly meets with his publisher. At the same time, he feels guilty about exploiting Inga this way, especially since he has fallen in love with her. When his publisher says that this would give the story an extra kick, Robert calls off the novel. In Konstanz, Inga discovers that Alexander now works as an orthopedist and makes an appointment with him. He realizes that she is his daughter, but appears unmoved, quickly calling in an intern and examining Inga for back pain. She spends the night outside his house, hoping to see Anne, but the woman who leaves Alexander’s house with a child the next day is not Anne. At the practice, Inga confronts Alexander, who explains everything. After escaping, Anne had been unable to come to terms with having to leave her daughter behind. In 1982 she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, so emotionally numb that even the doctor treating her had given up on her. All the more surprised were they when, in 1992, she still found the strength to take her own life. By then, Alexander had long since distanced himself from her and had stopped visiting her. Inga reproaches both the doctor and Alexander: if she had learned about her mother after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she would have visited her, and her mother might still be alive. She goes with Alexander to her mother’s grave. Alexander tells her that the inscription on the grave was chosen by Anne’s literature professor. Inga realizes that Robert had known all along that her mother was dead, and also learns that he had long planned to write a novel based on Anne’s diaries and notes, which she had entrusted to him. In his apartment, Inga sees drafts of the novel and his notes from the past few days. Robert gives her her mother’s diaries. Deeply disappointed, she returns to Malchow, only to say goodbye to Steffi. She leaves a letter for her grandparents and boards the next train without a destination in mind. During the journey, she begins writing down her own story.