Pension Boulanka (1964)

The story is set in East Berlin around the 1960s. While various performers at a revue theater are rehearsing for a new show, the magician Colanta returns from several engagements outside Berlin. Onstage, he bumps into a man he thinks he recognizes and follows him. The man leads him to the Boulanka artists’ boarding house, where many of the performers engaged for the revue—and the magician Colanta as well—are staying. As the man heads to the room of roller-skating acrobat Lore Hansen, Colanta is waylaid by the boarding-house owner, Emmi Boulanka, who first wants to have a schnapps with him. She tells him that the man is named Gruyter and moved into the room next to his a few days ago. Gruyter has meanwhile discovered that Lore, whom he had met during her earlier engagements in Magdeburg, tried to take her own life with pills and gas because she felt he had deceived her. His selfish intervention brings her back to life, however, because he had made a contract with her obliging her to go to South America, where she is to work as a dancer in a club. That very evening, Colanta phones from a post office, and a telegram he receives in response from Brussels confirms that in 1942 in Paris, Gruyter had acted as a Gestapo informer in the performing troupe formed by Colanta’s parents and sister, who lost their lives by hanging as a result of his betrayal. The next evening, the new revue opens. Shortly beforehand, Gruyter goes to the room of Frau Sievers, who is to perform a poodle act. It becomes clear that the two have known each other for a long time. When Gruyter suggests that he would like to spend the night at her home in Bremen, she makes it clear that under no circumstances will he get the key. She also wonders why he wants to leave so soon, even though the Belgian’s residence permit in the GDR remains valid for quite some time. As he leaves her room, he runs into Colanta, whom he suspects of snooping into his past, as he did three years earlier. Colanta calls him Fred Zumpe, but the man claims to be Jan Gruyter and goes to his room. There he is visited by the red-haired Else Päschke, who has a loud argument with him. After she leaves, someone comes to him with a bottle of schnapps. He assumes it is surely an attempt to make peace with him, but he is murdered on this occasion. Frau Sievers comes out of the bathroom, takes her dogs, which Frau Boulanka had been looking after while she bathed, and goes to the performance. Colanta, Lore Hansen, and the clown Ulf leave the house with her. At around nine o’clock, Frau Boulanka finds the body with a cord around its neck. She does not enter the room and immediately calls the police. Captain Brückner, First Lieutenant Becker, and Second Lieutenant Lorenz are assigned to investigate the case and set off at once. At first glance at the murder scene, Captain Brückner already has the impression that something is wrong. He is particularly troubled by the position of the schnapps glass lying on the floor, which he plans to test with water back at the office. He also finds it odd that there are no fingerprints on the glasses or the bottle. In any case, the criminal police begin their initial interviews with Frau Boulanka and Colanta, who conceals the fact that he knew the victim, followed by the clown Ulf and Frau Sievers, but they yield no results. There are, however, several other suspects who had dealings with Gruyter. One is the performer Hans Wolter, who had a joint stage act with him in Magdeburg and was abandoned by him in the middle of an engagement without being paid. Wolter came to Berlin to confront him. After Gruyter’s death, he returns to Magdeburg, but questioning by the local criminal police produces no new leads. Frau Päschke also returns to the boarding house to speak with Gruyter again. Since he is no longer alive, the criminal police question her instead. She explains that her daughter had been contractually committed by him to work in a South American nightclub, and that she had wanted to persuade him to cancel the contract. During the interview, however, it emerges that the sheath of the clothesline found in the victim’s room—the line used as the murder weapon—belonged to her and that she had forgotten it when she left. A further interrogation of Colanta, aided by a film from the 1940s, establishes that he and Gruyter had worked together in a performing troupe. Colanta tells them about his parents and sister, who had been engaged in Paris to entertain German troops and, as members of the illegal KPD, made contact with French resistance fighters. Gruyter betrayed them, which led to their deaths, while Colanta himself was able to be brought to safety. He also explains the change of name. As Belgian friends had confirmed to him, he had taken the papers of a Belgian man who had been shot during the war, which tallies with the criminal police’s findings. The autopsy, now completed, shows that Gruyter was not strangled but had already been poisoned with the toxin of a Japanese fugu, a member of the pufferfish family. During a further search of Gruyter’s room, the criminal police find, in a tin between two halves of a bar of soap, an impression of a security key. Having a key made from it is expected to help solve the case. Frau Boulanka is instructed to ask at breakfast whether anyone present is missing a key, but no one shows any real interest in it. Only Frau Sievers runs after one of her poodles to check whether her Bremen apartment key is still in the little pouch on its collar. The police observe her, and when it turns out to be the same key as the duplicate, it becomes clear who the murderer is. She also claims that she did not poison Gruyter, even though officially he was strangled. During the subsequent interrogation, the crime is reconstructed. Frau Sievers manages to steal from the clown Ulf’s ring the poison she suspects is inside it. After handing her dogs to Frau Boulanka while she bathes, and Frau Boulanka takes them into her own apartment, Frau Sievers leaves the bathroom again and goes to Gruyter with a bottle of schnapps. He is pleased to see her. She fills the glasses and slips the poison into his drink. Death follows within seconds, and Frau Sievers wipes away all traces. As she leaves the room, she spots the clothesline Frau Päschke had forgotten and stages a strangling to conceal the actual cause of death. She then manages to return to the bathroom unseen. At about the same time, the clown Ulf goes to Gruyter to discuss the return of the contract with Lore Hansen, who has confided in him. The door is unlocked, but Gruyter is already dead. Ulf searches for the contract, finds it, and takes it to his room, where he burns it. Frau Sievers comes out of the bathroom, takes her dogs back from Frau Boulanka, and goes to the performance. Under the crushing weight of the evidence, Frau Sievers decides to confess. She had known Gruyter for many years, and their relationship had at times been close and at other times casual. She had also supplied him with young women for dubious engagements. One day, he appeared at her home in Bremen to leave some pieces of luggage there. When she searched the suitcases out of curiosity, she found several hundred thousand marks’ worth of narcotics inside. Hoping she would not see Gruyter again soon, she decided to sell the valuable goods on her own. But now she had run into him again, and he wanted her apartment key so he could retrieve the suitcases. She was afraid he would fail to find them and report that to the drug ring, giving them her name and address—which would have meant certain death for her. In her eyes, murdering Gruyter was self-defense.