Verlobung in Hullerbusch (1979)

1960: Walter Wagemühl, a large-scale farmer in West Germany, is looking for someone to take over his farm because of his age and declining health. He therefore wants his adopted daughter, Catharina, to travel to East Germany, visit Walter’s nephew Ewald, and bring him back to the West and marry him if she likes him. Ewald lives in East Berlin and is just about to take his final exams for a degree in agricultural science. Afterward, he wants to become chairman of the agricultural production cooperative (LPG) in his home village of Hullerbusch. He has promised as much to Max Korn, secretary of the SED district leadership, whom he regards as a kind of mentor. But when Professor Schulz offers him an assistant’s position—and with it a start on an academic career—Ewald does not dare say no, especially since the offer comes with a question about his attitude toward the Party. At a party in the student club, Ewald and Catharina meet for the first time since childhood. They dance, and later Catharina takes him to her hotel in the western part of the city. Only there does she admit that her adoptive father has sent her to assess him as a potential husband and that she already has a plane ticket for him. Ewald is warmly welcomed at Walter’s farm. Walter confides that he has cancer and probably does not have long to live. He asks Ewald directly whether he wants to marry Catharina, and Ewald agrees to reassure Walter—and because, once again, he cannot bring himself to say no. Catharina, however, absolutely refuses to move to Hullerbusch, while Ewald does not want to go to the West; he wants to “help build socialism.” A few months later, Catharina travels to Hullerbusch to celebrate her engagement with Ewald, his father Ernst, and his grandmother. Walter cannot travel because of his illness, and he has also been estranged from his brother Ernst for a long time. Ernst believes Ewald has an academic career in Berlin ahead of him and has even already found him a house in Biesdorf. On a walk together, Catharina reveals her plans for the future: after Walter’s death, she wants to take over his farm with Ewald and turn it into a fur farm. Ewald is not interested in that, however, and still wants to run the Hullerbusch LPG. Ernst travels to the West to make peace with his terminally ill brother. Walter tells him that he has changed his will: he does not trust Catharina, whom he never formally adopted, so he has disinherited her and left the farm to Ewald instead. Ernst returns to Ewald with this (in his view) happy news. Ewald does not want to accept the inheritance, so it passes to Ernst, Walter’s closest living relative. Soon afterward, Ewald receives a telegram announcing Walter’s death. Ernst has moved to the West with his mother and is now managing Walter’s farm. Unable to match the shrewdness of West German businessmen, he lets a furniture salesman take advantage of him, trading valuable old farmhouse furniture in for far too little. Catharina, now disinherited, leaves the farm. Meanwhile, Ewald has come clean with Professor Schulz and told him how he has ended up caught between two sides and that he must turn down the assistant’s position. In response, Ewald is denied his degree on grounds of “weak character” and his illegal trip to the West, and is assigned “for a period of probation” to work as a laborer on a construction crew. But then the current chairman of the Hullerbusch LPG quits, and Max Korn urgently needs Ewald to replace him. Korn persuades the professor to let Ewald complete his studies after all, and takes the diploma certificate with him. Korn does not find Ewald at his Berlin apartment and fears he has fled to the West. But then he meets Ewald on the country road toward Hullerbusch, hands him his diploma, and makes him the new LPG chairman. In Ewald’s now-empty childhood home, he finds Catharina, who has been waiting for him there. She tells him about Ernst’s failures in managing the farm and about his grandmother’s homesickness; she plans to take her back home soon. Ewald hopes Catharina has changed her mind and will stay with him now. The two spend the night together, but the next morning Catharina has disappeared again. In the closing credits, the story jumps about 20 years into the future (that is, to the time when the film was made): Ewald, who has evidently made a successful career for himself, is driven by car through Hullerbusch, which has since grown and become more modern.