Summary
A frugal patch of Mecklenburg earth, cracked by drought and ancestral grudges, splits open to reveal a black, incendiary heart: petroleum that glints like Hell’s own chandelier beneath the wheat stubble. Into this scorched Eden steps Johannes, the restless second son whose gaze already burns hotter than the August sun; he exchanges the suffocating piety of his brother Peter’s farmhouse for the chandeliered corridors of Schloss Rudenberg, ink-stained ledgers beneath his fingernails, and the rustle of Gerda’s silk as she descends the marble staircase like a moonlit afterthought. Yet the estate’s real seduction lies deeper: a forgotten pasture, mythic in local lore as ‘the devil’s blanket,’ where sheep refuse to graze and dowsers’ rods vibrate with diabolic hunger. When Johannes, moonlighting as amateur geologist, tastes the seepage and recognizes the unmistakable kerosene perfume of future fortunes, his allegiance pivots faster than a weathervane in a storm. He courts the Count’s childlike daughter only until the widowed Helga—icy, statuesque, draped in mourning veils that flutter like ravens’ wings—inherits that cursed acreage. Marriage becomes merger; kisses become contracts. Gears of deception grind: forged survey reports, a suspicious stable fire, a servant girl named Maria whose love letters Johannes once wore next to his skin and now uses as tinder. The soil, once scratched, bleeds fire; the human fabric, once torn, cannot be re-woven. In the final reel, headlights of nascent industrial derricks pierce the mist while Peter, biblical staff in hand, strides across the ancestral field to confront a brother now draped in petroleum-soaked evening wear. Their clash is less fratricide than a sacrificial immolation: one match, one scream, one column of flame mushrooming against the night like a perverse sunrise. When the smoke clears, the blackened earth glistens richer than before—an obscene fertility—while the survivors trudge away, nostrils singed with the smell of ambition rendered as crude and undeniable as oil.
When farmer Rog dies, his son Peter stays, but Johannes can not be satisfied with such a condition (and servant Maria's love) and finds a job as old Count Rudenberg's secretary. His ambition leads him to charm Gerda, the Count's unique daughter. But when he discovers that Count's second wife Helga will soon inherit a field that only he knows his underground is full with petroleum, he changes his allegiance... Greed and death.
