Unser kurzes Leben (1981)

Wolfgang cannot bear being married to an architect with a diploma, an intellectual, while he himself has remained an ordinary worker. He turns to drink. Franziska Linkerhand’s marriage, entered into too early when she was eighteen, falls apart. There is no longer any shared intellectual ground on which they can understand one another. After the divorce, the architect decides to leave her job in Dresden. She no longer wants to be the sheltered, favored student of a prominent professor; instead, she wants to prove her abilities on her own in the hard realities of everyday work. She asks for a year’s leave, and it is granted. She does not need a large moving van for the move to her new post, since her ex-husband’s family almost completely empties the apartment. Once she arrives in the mid-sized district town, she is assigned to the existing municipal architect’s office. The route from the railway station takes Franziska through the cemetery. What symbolism: she encounters a team that has long since surrendered to the constraints of practical work. Industrialized housing construction on the edge of the historic old town, with no connection to it, under the motto: as much as possible, as quickly and cheaply as possible. Here she tries to bring her ideals of livable housing into line with reality. She soon realizes that the head of the office, Schafheutlin, can no longer see this reality, so clashes are inevitable. But Franziska does not give up. “Living and dwelling,” Professor Reger had impressed on her, “are, tellingly, two separate concepts only in German.” Franziska wants to abolish the separation of living, working, and leisure, which is being cast in concrete in the satellite housing project on the outskirts, and proposes a competition to reconstruct the old town. At first, Schafheutlin turns a deaf ear to her. But she wins allies, including Kowalski, an experienced colleague who has encouraged her from the start, and even the architect Grabbe, who seems so hidebound but contributes ideas of his own for designing a pedestrian zone. Eventually, the municipal architect is willing to make the case to the housing construction combine. The competition is indeed announced. Frau Helwig’s tavern becomes a refuge for Franziska whenever, for one reason or another, she wants to escape the workers’ hostel. Some time ago, she noticed a quiet patron there who reads Die Weltbühne amid all the commotion—and hardly ever puts it down, even when out on the street. This apparently introverted intellectual seems to Franziska like an oasis in the desert—and yet Trojanovicz is only a dump-truck driver. But he has a mysterious past: the hostel’s caretaker reveals that he is supposed to have been in prison. “Better thirty wild years than seventy respectable, peaceful ones”: her love for him is sincere—and as uncompromising as the life she has led so far. Franziska wants him wholly for herself, but Trojanovicz lives with Sigrid and does not want to abandon her after she sacrificed everything for him in difficult times. So Franziska loses him. The jury, which includes Schafheutlin, selects Franziska Linkerhand’s design as the best. But reality is different: the combine thanks her warmly, yet sees no way to put it into practice for the foreseeable future. There will be no reconstruction of the old town, no love—only a clean slate and a retreat beneath the professor’s protective wing. Only recently, at the ceremonial opening of a theater whose planning she helped with, he assured her that he was counting on her rejoining his team. Then Schafheutlin arrives at Franziska’s, where she is practically already packed and ready to leave, for a personnel interview…