Summary
An amber dusk settles over the fracturing province of Ostpreussen, where ancestral manors rot like bruised apples and the spectral silhouette of Paul von Hindenburg looms larger than any flesh-and-blood patriarch. In this fever-dream of a nation, Siegmund Aschenbach’s bankrupt Junker clings to crumbling estates by day and, by night, projects his mortification onto lantern-slide images of the Marshal—conjuring a colossus stitched from iron crosses, oak leaves, and the family’s own intergenerational shame. Across fog-choked pastures, Gustav Trautschold’s itinerant cinematographer arrives with a crate of hand-cranked cameras, hoping to bottle the region’s dying breath for newsreels that will never screen outside Berlin’s most obscure salons. Käthe Haack’s rebellious daughter—half sibyl, half scarlet fugitive—slips between both men, her silhouette refracted through cracked prisms of Lutheran guilt and proto-cinematic desire. Together they orchestrate a phantasmal pageant: re-enactments of trench assaults staged in potato cellars, torch-lit torch songs crooned over mildewed regimental banners, and a final, delirious attempt to resurrect the Marshal himself through celluloid, smoke, and sheer ancestral spite. The reel ends not with victory or defeat but with the province’s last horse dragging a dolly shot across a frozen lagoon, its hooves shattering the ice so that the reflection of Hindenburg splits into a thousand bobbing shards—each fragment a vanished border, each frame a funeral hymn for an identity that never truly existed.
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