In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.
Direction
Wajda's surgical precision dissecting collaboration and memory.
Acting
Schygulla's devastating restraint as a woman erased by shame.
Director
Andrzej Wajda
Hanna Schygulla
Pauline Kropp
Armin Mueller-Stahl
Mayer
Ralf Wolter
Schulze
Daniel Olbrychski
Wiktorczyk
Bernhard Wicki
Dr. Borg
Gérard Desarthe
Karl Wyler
Elisabeth Trissenaar
Elisabeth Schnittgens
Sigfrit Steiner
Melchior
Ben Becker
Klaus
Otto Sander
Narrator
Friedrich G. Beckhaus
Zinngruber
Gernot Duda
Stackmann
Serge Merlin
Alker
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Based on Rolf Hochhuth's novel, itself sparked by real events in his mother's village—Wajda, a Polish director, brought outsider clarity to German collective guilt.
Mayer's impossible position—knowing the system's evil while trapped within it—mirrors Wajda's own examinations of Polish complicity in his earlier films.
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