Zucker – Eine wirklich süße Katastrophe (1989)

The marriage of research couple Kaminski is shaped by each partner wanting to stay one step ahead of the other in their research. In search of recycling bacteria that will make the growing mountains of garbage disappear, Lydia Kaminski-Smith uses genetic engineering to create voracious microbes that can metabolize wastepaper and cotton into sugar. In a letter to her husband, she boasts about her latest achievement. After some time, the letter and other paper objects in his study disintegrate into sugar. Horrified, Leo Kaminski rushes to a lending library where he had returned an infected book. But every shelf there has already been turned into sugar, and more books that were infected had been borrowed from the library. It turns out that Lydia Kaminski-Smith let her dog into her laboratory, and the bacteria were presumably able to become a plague through the dog. Other bacteria have escaped too, and after his conversation with his wife, they make Leo Kaminski’s car rust completely in just a few minutes. When a plane takes off carrying an infected document, he comments drily that the paperless “digital age” has apparently now well and truly begun. The bacteria make the precious holdings of the national libraries and paper money disintegrate into sugar, along with schoolbooks, files, minutes, and toilet paper. Postmen have to deliver telegrams and letters orally. When Leo Kaminski, the designated “Oskar-Flobell” Prize winner, realizes the consequences of his research, he makes a spectacular exit from life, also worn down by the police hunt. The pastor reads his eulogy from stone tablets.