"Idealists and cynics, staying and leaving, love and duty, we and I. Clashing, through gallows humour and visual poetry. A modern ode to “broken generations” everywhere."
-- Clarence Tsui, film critic
Following a nervous breakdown, Rita Seidel returns to the village of her childhood. She has been told to get some proper rest. She wants to regain her strength and uses this period of convalescence to mull over her past. She had met Manfred Herrfurth, a chemist ten years her senior, and had fallen irresistibly in love with him precisely because his mind was so utterly unlike her own. He was uncommonly intelligent and a keen observer of both people and things. Rita is a natural, open-minded person, full of expectations for the future. Herrfurth, on the other hand, has become cynical as a result of bitter experience.
Rita moves to town to live with her lover, to begin a new life as it were and to become a teacher. Many things are new and thrilling; town life itself as well as her work. But living with Manfred turns out very differently from what she originally dreamt of. He is embittered and after seeing a chemical process which he has developed and whose realisation he has pinned his hopes on rejected, he becomes totally discouraged and leaves for West Berlin. He is convinced that Rita will follow him. But she does not. Being separated from him, taking leave of her great love, triggers a psychological crisis and breakdown. Of course, some wounds will remain, but Rita is a strong woman who will overcome this crisis.
