"Any legal system that requires a terminal patient to endure pointless suffering without the benefit of relief is unnatural and inhumane. Nature lets things die quickly when life is no longer viable. Medical science with its pills and its drugs insists on artificially delaying the mercy of a quick, natural death, even when a cure or improvement is completely impossible."
This is far more than a piece of fine dramatic cinema with a superior cast. The writing is high-wire taut and its courtroom scenes in particular make for riveting viewing. Ich klage an must surely have presented to German society a most credible and utterly compelling argument for, at the very least, a rational debate on the subject of euthanasia. And it is not merely a vehicle for some sinister National Socialist doctrine, but rather a beautifully moving and profoundly disturbing document of the period, with a relevance undiminished by its age or the political system which held sway at the time.
At the piano, her left hand falters.
Brilliant medical researcher Thomas Heyt has been appointed to a professorship in Munich, and at an intimate gathering to celebrate the event, the first signs of something amiss with his vivacious young wife Hanna appear. Accompanying her on cello, Dr Bernhard Lang. Had he simply asked Hanna for marriage years before, rather than introducing her to his student friend Thomas, she would have readily accepted. He has now held a torch for her ever since, but respects unreservedly the love which binds his two friends.
Hanna hopes that this sudden strange sensation is a sign of a longed-for pregnancy, but as her condition quite rapidly deteriorates and paralysis begins to ravage her body, it becomes evident that something far less benign is occurring. Bernhard's tests lead to an unmistakable diagnosis – Multiple Sclerosis. A certain and painful death. And as husband Thomas works tirelessly in his laboratory to discover the cure which he feels sure can be found in time, Bernhard does what he can to ease her ever-increasing suffering.
The medicine. In small doses a necessary palliative. She wants to know more.
"Her life was becoming an unbearable torture both physically and spiritually. She saw her husband suffer as a result, and was unable to release herself from her pain because of the paralysis. Otherwise she would have done it herself."
Thomas will help me one way or the other.
Because I loved her more, I did it.
As the drama then moves into the courtroom, we are assailed with the tightest and most thought-provoking of scripts. This aspect made for absolutely mesmeric viewing, and the distillation of the language into subtitles provided no barrier whatsoever. Accused of murder, the moral dilemmas now take hold. Expert medical witnesses are called. Was it the overdose which actually killed Hanna or could it have been the actual disease? What acts are incompatible with a doctor's oath and why? When does the relief of suffering become murder?
There is one small but critical scene in this movie upon which so much hinges. It is but one powerful image among so many others:
Hanna's death has left Bernhard a broken man. His friend's intervention has taken the life of the woman they both loved. It is then that he opens a letter. The parents of a young girl he had once successfully treated request that he see them as soon as possible, and it is behind a locked door in a children's ward that he is left to ponder the legacy of his life-saving work: "She's blind, she's deaf, she's demented. It's wonderful you healed her doctor, instead of letting the poor creature die."
We are one step from a stunning climax.
"The right to kill shouldn't be given to a doctor alone, these final medical decisions should be left to the state."
There are very few visual references to betray this movie's Third Reich origins. Only once, on a back wall in Thomas's office, do we fleetingly see the portrait of Adolf Hitler. The legal robes bear the appropriate Hoheitszeichen, and we catch a glimpse of the Hitlergruβ as the court resumes after an adjournment, but that's about it. The almost avuncular judge does however make a stunning contrast to the rabidly hypothalamic Roland Freisler of the July 20 show-trials.
Heidemarie Hatheyer's performance in particular as the young wife is transcendent.
