Und Jimmy ging zum Regenbogen (2008)

Berlin, 1996: Manuel Aranda, an Argentine surgeon in his forties, has come to Berlin to arrange for his father Rodolpho Aranda’s body to be transferred home to Buenos Aires. Eighty-year-old Rodolpho Aranda was poisoned with cyanide in a library by an elderly woman who worked there. She then killed herself. Her name was Valerie Steinfeld. At the morgue, Manuel collects his father’s personal effects, including a wallet containing foreign currency. He then visits Valerie Steinfeld’s still-new grave. There he meets a young mixed-race woman who introduces herself as Valerie Steinfeld’s granddaughter. Her name is Irene Waldeck. Manuel wants to know why his father was murdered. Irene is equally interested. She is a police officer and takes Manuel to meet her mentor and superior, Chief Inspector Groll. Manuel is in danger. The US intelligence service, represented by Agent Grant, and the French intelligence service, represented by Agent Mercier, are pursuing him. He escapes death at the hands of a French sniper only because the sniper is killed just before he can pull the trigger. Manuel speaks perfect German because, at his father Rodolpho’s request, he attended a German school in Buenos Aires. He and Irene go to the crime scene, the library. At the time of his murder, Rodolpho Aranda had been reading a book about Adolf Hitler. Manuel is perplexed, but deeply convinced that his father was innocent. Irene takes him to her grandmother Valerie Steinfeld’s book-restoration workshop in a room at the library. It was from there that the murderess had taken the cyanide capsule intended for Manuel’s father. The first clue is a business card in Rodolpho’s wallet: Chez Nora—a brothel and a nest of spies. Nora Hill, the owner of the brothel, had been a double agent for England and Germany during the Third Reich. She was friends with Valerie Steinfeld. Valerie, who was married to a Jew who had emigrated to London during Nazi rule, tried to save her “half-Jewish” son Heinz from the concentration camps through a paternity case. In the case, she claimed to have had an affair with her childhood friend Willy Schäfer, who had just been killed in action. This made her son Heinz a full-blooded Aryan and spared him the sadistic discrimination of his schoolteacher, Friedjung. Heinz immediately volunteered for the Waffen-SS and was killed in Hungary in the penultimate year of the war. Friedjung became a chemist and appeared to have died when his laboratory exploded after the end of the Third Reich. Irene Waldeck’s mother, Martha Waldeck, née Steinfeld, says that as a child she knew nothing of her status as a “half-Jew” because she had grown up with an Aryan family named Germer. She had thought Maria Germer was her mother and Valerie Steinfeld her aunt. She had never met Heinz. Judging by the photograph, Martha’s husband was an African American soldier. That is why Irene is mixed race. Just as Manuel and Irene are about to end their visit, Martha remembers Valerie Steinfeld’s diary at the last moment. Manuel and Irene then find it in Valerie’s workshop at the library. As they leave the library, they notice that they are being followed. In the underground parking garage, Manuel wants to confront their pursuers. Irene points a gun at him to stop him from walking into his death. In the elevator on the way up, it becomes clear that the cool young police officer already feels closer to Manuel than she lets on. Remembering his father’s habit of hiding keys in his shoe, Manuel searches his father’s apartment and finds a key to a safe-deposit box. Nora Hill had advised Manuel to look into “AP7.” The contents of the box are encrypted research findings by the chemist Rodolpho Aranda on “AP7,” a nerve agent. These are the documents the intelligence services are desperate to obtain. But without being deciphered, they are worthless. At Chez Nora, Manuel learns from Yvonne, a prostitute who had “looked after” Rodolpho, about a poem by Rudyard Kipling that Rodolpho loved and which contained the line “And Jimmy went to the rainbow’s foot.” He quickly realizes that this could be the code key. He and Irene are now being threatened more and more openly. Their car explodes before their eyes. A powerful feeling develops between them. Irene is convinced their meeting was fated and that Manuel is the man of her life. Manuel feels the same way. They cling to one another and become lovers. Using decryption software at Chief Inspector Groll’s office, they are able to read the plaintext. Manuel has to face the fact that his father did not, as he had believed and hoped, invent a new medicine to benefit humanity, as a humanitarian doctor at a hospital in a poor district of Buenos Aires. Instead, he created a highly potent chemical weapon of mass destruction. Seven molecules of “AP7” are enough to kill a full-grown bull instantly; a few kilograms would wipe out all life on Earth: people, animals, and plants. And the formulas are right there on the screen before him. Manuel, whose life’s purpose is to save lives, feels obligated to destroy the documents. He burns them. The intelligence services watch him do it. Manuel is now a marked man. Neither service can be sure the other has no copy, or might obtain one, unless Aranda is silenced. Manuel sees one way out: flee through a third country to Buenos Aires, home, and the sea. His passport is expiring. At the Argentine embassy, he is confronted with the sabotage-by-arson of the Aranda Chemicals plant in La Copelina. The La Copelina chemical factory was built during Argentina’s military dictatorship. The ambassador knows, and Manuel now suspects, that military secrets were kept there: chemical weapons. He learns that his father Rodolpho was not born an Argentine, but was a German immigrant. The naturalization certificate leaves no doubt about Rodolpho’s German name: Friedjung. Argentina does not want the country disgraced by being linked to the Aranda scandal and accused of experimenting with weapons of mass destruction. Manuel is denied re-entry to his homeland, and his possessions and entire estate are confiscated. Now he has nothing left. Chief Inspector Groll checks Friedjung’s file. The likelihood that the former Nazi Friedjung did not burn to death in his laboratory after the end of the Third Reich, but emigrated to Argentina under the name Aranda, grows ever greater. Manuel’s feeling when he saw an old photograph of Friedjung—that it reminded him of his own father—provides further confirmation. He is the son of the former Nazi Karl Friedjung. That also explains his blond hair. The discovery that his father was a potential mass murderer is bitter, and it is probably only a matter of time before he himself is hit by a sniper’s bullet. In the library, Valerie Steinfeld did not murder an anonymous Argentine, but the old identity of Rodolpho Aranda: Friedjung, whose brutal discrimination against Jews had ultimately driven her son Heinz into an elite Aryan unit and thus to a pointless death on a battlefield in Hungary. Chief Inspector Groll is Manuel’s last resort. He will give Manuel a new identity. His price: Manuel must let Groll’s protégé, Irene Waldeck, go. Irene would be in too much danger near him. Manuel meets Irene once more at the hotel where they first made love. When she wakes the next morning, the bed beside her is empty.