Zwischen den Zeiten (2014)

In 1986, seventeen-year-old West Berlin schoolgirl Annette Schuster falls in love with Michael Rosch, a student from Potsdam and the son of a pastor, during a school trip to East Germany. Rosch hides in her school bus to escape from the GDR, but she discovers him. Afraid of the possible consequences, she makes him get off the bus at a rest stop. The Stasi has witnessed the attempted escape, threatens Michael with a prison sentence, and instead recruits him as an unofficial informant. Later, he is promoted to an IM on special assignment, is allowed to study medicine, and spies on medical students, fellow doctors, and the renowned nuclear medicine specialist Professor Dagmar Evert. Twenty-eight years later, Annette Schuster works as a team leader helping reconstruct 16,000 sacks of shredded Stasi files. Her partner, Johannes Güttler, also works on the team as a historian. She has a long-grown son from her youthful romance in Potsdam, who does not know his biological father. One day, Annette discovers torn surveillance photos of her former lover, and shortly afterward finds his IM file, including a handwritten declaration of commitment. She holds herself partly responsible for his subsequent Stasi career, seeks to talk things through with him, and is starting to fall in love with him again. This puts her in a moral dilemma. After all, she has been in a committed relationship for years. She confides her past to Dr. Jörn Rabe, a trusted friend and colleague, but he has his own particular problems with the Stasi and its machinations. His friend, a dissident in the GDR, died of cancer some time ago after the Stasi deliberately exposed him to strontium-90. Rabe, too, is seriously ill, and Annette persuades him to let Michael examine him of all people. But Michael can only give him a 50–50 chance of beating the disease. When Michael learns from Annette the real reasons she has contacted him after so many years, he is deeply angry. He intends to send her away, but in the end cannot bring himself to do it, and they spend the night together. Once they fully grasp the drama of their past and realize that they have both incurred guilt, Michael’s former case officer also appears. He tries to sow distrust by suggesting that Annette is seeking Michael’s company only for career reasons. The machine intended to digitally reassemble the Stasi files has stalled for the moment, giving them a little more time to act. But Michael refuses to hear any of it. Even so, he argues with Annette, who is gradually beginning to understand the likely scale of Michael’s work as an IM. He had been assigned specifically to Professor Evert. During their argument, Michael learns that he has a son and now decides to take the offensive. He visits Johannes Güttler and gives him documents proving that the radiologist Evert was not researching how much ionizing radiation a person could withstand without harm, but, on the contrary, at what dose it becomes lethal. The aim was to cause illness and determine which element was most effective. Even so, he remains guilty, too. What consequences Michael’s statement against Professor Evert will have is left unresolved. Annette arranges a meeting between her son and his father. She realizes that one cannot live “between times”: “You have to face life, with all its mistakes.”