Schuldig (1913)

Thomas Lehr, a clerk at Häusler & Son, is by nature a peaceful man and a family man who has never attracted attention. One day, worried that his pistol is not safe at home with his young son around, he takes it to the office and puts it in his desk drawer. The company’s attendant, Wilhelm Schmidt, steals it from there and shoots the junior boss when the latter catches him trying to plunder the company’s cash. Schmidt needs the money for his grand plans: he wants to emigrate to America. Suspicion falls on Lehr not only because he owned the weapon, but also because people know he had become increasingly uncomfortable with Häusler junior courting Lehr’s wife, Martha. Schmidt also cleverly plants other clues pointing to Thomas as the culprit. At trial, the innocent man is convicted and sent to prison. This period brings great hardship for Lehr’s wife, Martha, and their two children, Julie, known as Julchen, and Karl. The innkeeper Kramer, who has his eye on the attractive, single mother, helps her by hiring Martha as a housekeeper at his inn. Twenty years later, Schmidt returns from the United States to his old home, wealthy but also old and ill. He wants to ease his conscience and confesses to the murder both to a clergyman and to the public prosecutor. Standing face to face with his emaciated, aged victim, Thomas Lehr, Prisoner Number 37, Schmidt cannot bear the sight and collapses dead. Lehr’s homecoming does not go as he had hoped. He finds his family again at Kramer’s inn, and they do not recognize him at first. Karl has become a drunk, and Julchen goes to a dance hall with an especially bad reputation. His own wife has become the innkeeper’s mistress. Enraged by the return of his long-missing father, Karl wants to kill his rival Kramer with a hatchet, but Father Lehr stops the impetuous young man from committing this mad act. Although Martha initially pushes her husband away in disgust, she slowly begins to realize all that this man, who languished innocently behind bars for two decades, must have suffered. Faced with the man who profited from his misery, Thomas Lehr forgets all the advice he had given his son and does to Kramer what Karl had intended to do. “Now I really am guilty!” Lehr cries, demanding that they take him back to the place he knows so well: the penitentiary.