Verlorenes Leben (1976)

In German Silesia, somewhere on an estate in 1927, an eight-year-old girl is found dead one day. There is no doubt: she has been murdered. It was a sex crime. The prejudiced police commissioner Weber is certain that Siegfried Cioska, the Polish landscape gardener—a hulking, bear-like man—must have committed the horrific act. The only problem is that he cannot prove it at all. So Weber resorts to a trick. When Cioska, no longer able to bear the accusations and insults of the local population, moves on to Berlin, Weber sets one of Cioska’s countrymen on his trail. Visually, he is the gardener’s complete opposite: a scrawny weakling named Wenzel Sigorski, a Polish student, is supposed to win Cioska’s trust as an informant and extract a confession from him as soon as possible. In fact, the two very different men gradually become friends through their shared activities and develop something like a male friendship. Sigorski cannot be happy about this, since it means that, in light of his shabby double-dealing, qualms are gradually taking hold of him. Wenzel soon believes Siegfried is innocent, but Weber does not care. He wants Cioska to be guilty, and clings to that belief with ever-growing, merciless fanaticism. To finally get a result that satisfies him, Commissioner Weber sets a trap for the gardener: he has Sigorski pretend to commit a murder, which Cioska unwittingly witnesses. Sigorski pretends he has to flee because Cioska now has him in his power. At that point, Cioska finally confesses to the girl’s murder, hoping that now they will be even. Weber is deeply satisfied. He arrests the culprit, who is later executed, although—this is Runze’s directorial device, as in Robert Wise’s courtroom classic I Want to Live!—the director leaves it open whether Cioska really committed the horrific crime, or whether he made this “confession” because he feared that otherwise he would lose his only friend in Germany, his fellow countryman Sigorski. After betraying his friend, Sigorski nearly breaks down. In the aftermath of Cioska’s death, he undergoes a moral catharsis, turns away from worldly life, and decides to become a priest. On a night of bombing during the Second World War, he tells his story while a war rages outside—a war that also arose from the collapse of the very morality of which he and Cioska were victims.