Tanz auf der Kippe (1991)

As a television in a construction trailer—used as a break room by workers at a rubbish dump—shows footage from the eve of the celebrations marking the GDR’s 40th anniversary, a young man is beaten up by several men nearby. The last attacker presses the young man’s head into a puddle containing acid, injuring the corneas of his eyes. With difficulty, the young man makes his way to a tap to rinse his eyes. The next shots show him at an eye clinic, undergoing initial treatment. We also learn that he is 17-year-old Gerat Lauter. When his parents visit him in hospital the following day, his father tells him that the chief physician has said everything will be all right and that he can gladly come home again. Gerat pulls away from his father’s hand as it touches him. The doctors tell him that he will need new corneas. In the flashbacks that follow, the film shows how this came about. At the funeral of a teacher who has died, tenth-grade student Gerat Lauter remarks that the wrong people always die. His teacher, Claudia Lohanz, hears him, takes him along in her car, and talks with him about what he said. She gives him the feeling that she understands his struggle for honesty and truth. His father, by contrast, wants to force his son to adapt to society. The two fall out over an application for an apprenticeship as an assembly fitter, because it does not meet the father’s expectations. Gerat does not want to flatter the company offering the apprenticeship in his application, even if his remarks rub people the wrong way. This also leads to a scuffle between father and son, while his mother merely watches. He and his teacher also disagree about the application, yet Gerat feels increasingly drawn to her. His father tries to smooth over the reaction to Gerat’s application by inviting a senior employee from the company to the ceremony where Gerat is to receive his school-leaving certificate. The attempt ends with his son being thrown out. While looking for somewhere to stay, Gerat gets Claudia Lohanz to find him a furnished room at the home of a female fellow student’s mother. The two share their first tender moment of closeness. On a walk, he also passes an old gas holder where work is under way. He recognizes Claudia’s husband there and asks him whether he can work there too, but her husband says no. Gerat next goes to the municipal services department to apply for a job. Although the personnel manager honestly tells him that it is not pleasant work, Gerat accepts the position, which offers the prospect of vocational training. Until that can happen, he is given a job at the rubbish dump, where he is supposed to help his colleagues keep things in order. They also take metal to a scrap dealer for private sale, but Gerat takes none of the money. He keeps trying to get in touch with Claudia, with whom he has fallen deeply in love, but she makes it clear that he should not get his hopes up, even though he is no longer her pupil. He hears nothing different from her husband when they meet, either. But one day Claudia comes to the dump to visit Gerat, while his colleagues head off to do a private second shift. After the now-happy couple dance exuberantly around the dump, they end up in the trailer and make love. Their happiness lasts only a short time: Claudia tells him that her husband is dismantling the gas holder to sell the scrap to the West on behalf of the GDR. She admits that she has known about it for some time. This angers Gerat so much that he immediately gets dressed again to do something about it. He sends Claudia into town to gather people who can prevent the metal from being taken away. When he realizes that his two colleagues are loading parts of the gas holder, he takes a wheel loader to stop the departing freight train. When that does not seem to be working, he uses the loader’s bucket to tear the tracks out of their bed. Now he can only flee, but his two colleagues, Claudia’s husband, and a People’s Police officer catch up with him at the dump and beat him. Claudia’s husband then presses his head into the caustic liquid, even though he has already been beaten. After the operation on his first eye, the professor asks what he can see. Gerat sees Claudia standing in the corridor, blurred.