Like God in Heaven, the editorial team of ARD Degeto has “arranged everything according to measure, number and weight”.

Genders, skin colors, age groups, and sexual preferences must be represented among the characters in the feature films in a proportion capable of consensus.

The scriptwriters are stung by a creative thorn, against which it is a great art to crack.

Robert Krause and Beate Fraunholz managed in their submission for Ed Herzog's film “3½ hours” that something halfway plausible came out of it, even if one clearly noticed the political instructions on fair representation.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the features section.

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In the interzone train D 151, which made its way from Munich Central Station to Berlin Ostbahnhof on Sunday morning August 13, 1961, there was the old retired couple from the GDR who picked up the urn of the woman's deceased brother from Munich, but did not visit the escaped son in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. There is the “girl from the east” - this is what the weather-beaten Martin Feifel, as detective inspector Koch, calls little Sabine (Hannah Schiller) appreciatively, because he knows what a lifetime achievement should be - as an all-German gymnastics champion. But there are also the bride and groom Rudolf Hoffmann and Ingrid Born and their little son Hans Born, who can be clearly seen that he was probably left behind by a black American occupation soldier. In any case, he is already happy that he will soon have "a new dad",not knowing that the new dad will soon be overtaken by his criminal past under National Socialism.

The workforce is sorted

The Kügler couple, he an aircraft engineer, she - yes, what actually?

- at least the daughter of a police officer and a staunch communist, has been gender-symmetrically blessed with a shrewd son and an ambitious daughter.

And the daring band of four, which we meet in the first picture while cuddling in bed, is composed - as if the world were a sample catalog - just as symmetrically as a pair of lovers of man and woman as one of man and man.

But that's not all: the woman who loves her is exposed as an informant for the Stasi, but this doesn't bother him because - as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust - he has learned that there is true freedom only within one's own heart.

Since no wishes remain unsatisfied.

As well as the staff on the train has been pre-sorted by the ARD guideline commissions, the questions they have to ask themselves in the film are just as serious: The passengers learn via a portable radio that the GDR leadership is having a wall built in Berlin and that the Division of Germany is concreted. They have three and a half hours to the zone border to decide where to live. Anyone who drives beyond Ludwigstadt accepts - without being able to know exactly - living in the GDR for up to twenty-eight years.

What is now being negotiated in the dialogues has some weight because the decision is not that easy. The communist Marlis Kügler (Susanne Bormann) states that women in the Federal Republic “got stuck in the Third Reich in terms of emancipation”. As proof of this, the parallel story shows Luisa-Céline Gaffron as steam engine driver Edith Salzmann in the GDR, where full employment and financial self-determination for women had long been the norm when in the West the wives still had to ask their husbands for work permits.

When Siggi Tremper (Karl Schaper) gives his lover Peter Laschke (Johannes Meister) a hearty slap on the buttocks, he gets shocked: "Man, we're still in the West." the Nazis tightened the form, while the GDR had long suspended the prosecution. And one more thing: “In the West you can't live on five marks a day,” the band guitarist Sasha Goldberg (Jeff Wilbusch) points out to the singer Carla Engel (Alli Neumann).

In this weighing up of a fateful decision, a new tone can be noticed in the dispute with the GDR on public television, which had already made itself heard in the third season of the series "Charité": Who, given the choice, could decide Which part of Germany he or she wanted to live in and opted for the GDR was not automatically stupid, cowardly or ideologically blinded. There were reasons to prefer attachment to people and landscapes in the East to the promises of freedom made by the West. A guarantee for a successful life - Martin Feifel also expresses this - was not associated with any decision.

The film is a little mistrustful of the weight of the issues it negotiates. The without exception excellent drama would create enough tension to forego the moving camera, the constant tumbling of the images, but also the - basically good and atmospheric - music by Stefan Will. Alli Neumann, who plays the singer Carla, wrote some songs for the film together with Jonathan Kluth. They alone would have worn the film well, although stylistically they did not fit the time and the band was more reminiscent of that of Veronika Fischer from the 1970s in the GDR. The editor Christoph Pellander is convinced that the film "will find its way into history lessons in schools". To be honest, it was shot with this intention.

3 ½ hours

runs on this Saturday at 8.15 p.m. in the first.