Max Grashof

Romantic comedy about a series of mix-ups. Brigitte Kaufmann wants to divorce her husband Jörg who is an engineer and chief executive of an electronics company – and a hopeless pedant. Benno, a former boy friend of Brigitte, has a slightly bizarre idea how they could save their marriage. A piano player, whom Benno has seen in a bar, and who looks exactly like Jörg, is asked to work his charms on Brigitte and to try to dissuade her from divorce while Jörg is on a business trip. Piano player Engel agrees on the plan and acts as Jörg at home with Brigitte as well as in Jörg′s workplace.

This biographical film is set in 1937, with Fallada suffering the effects of living under a microscope. The film details his decline, as he is intermittently imprisoned and threatened in order to motivate him to write for the Fatherland. Even the attention of his kind, patient wife and loving children begin to feel oppressive to him. This is one of the few films to take a serious, in-depth look at the tribulations of a creative artist pulled in all different directions by the real world.