He only says this one, the most important sentence in the whole film: “You are free.” In the end, when the Jewish notary Josef Bartok from the Vienna Hotel Metropole staggered, after months of solitary confinement, after severe torture, when he was in his well-worn suit Standing there and the sun is shining and people are walking as if nothing had happened, as if a person had not lost all his dignity and strength here, humiliated by the henchmen of a terror regime, in the middle of Vienna, executed in front of everyone: one that has so far been so delicacy proud soul. "Policeman Erich" (Moritz von Treuenfels), who had silently brought him soup every day, while the horror of what he had experienced was reflected more and more clearly on his young, almost boyish face, called after him with relief that he was now free may be. Free at last.But the prisoner no longer understands the guard's words, just as little as he understands the glow of the sun. For him, all of these are just moves in a never-ending game of chess.
In January 1942, a few months before his suicide, Philipp Stölzl filmed Stefan Zweigs' completed “Schachnovelle” once more. Sixty years after director Georg Oswald brought the material to the screen with Curd Jürgens in the main role more or less true to the text, Stölzl is fairly “free” with the last work of the author, who was desperate in exile in Brazil.
For him, the focus of the plot is not on the crossing to America, but on the hell of Viennese solitary confinement.
It is not the encounter with a nameless first-person narrator that makes “Dr B.” remember;
instead, light bulbs, grandfather clock hands and scotch bottles act as triggers for long flashbacks.
Even the appearance of his invented wife Anna (gently alluded to by Birgit Minichmayr) leads the disturbed to the question: "How was it before?"
Torturers will soon be sent
Before, before the night of his arrest. Before, when he went to the opera, wealthy and proud, with a mustache and a three-piece suit, and had jokes told about Joseph Goebbels: “As long as Vienna is dancing, the world cannot end.” But it will end, and for him in just one night : He is driven past National Socialists waving a torch to the hotel quarters of the regional Gestapo head, who sends him "special treatment" because he refuses to reveal the bank details of his wealthy clients. He was locked in a room for months, initially with a view of the courtyard and friendly attempts to persuade him, then the windows were walled up and torturers sent. A book helps him not to lose his mind: no narrative literature, but a collection of famous chess games. He learns them by heartre-enacts it in his head, becomes a manic chess player, splits the reality of horror off in favor of the fiction of an ever wider move.