Wer unter Euch ohne Sünde ist...

Summary

Berlin’s twilight years between wars: a city of fractured neon and confessionals that smell of damp wood. At the film’s nucleus stands Margarete (Mady Christians), bourgeois wife to an austere jurist, whose immaculate façade conceals a vortex of dormant desire. When her adolescent daughter’s suitor, the taciturn law clerk Stefan (Hans Schweikert), becomes Margarete’s clandestine lover, the household’s chandeliers seem to vibrate with unspoken transgressions. Lya Mara’s Lola—an androgynous nightclub chanteuse who drifts through the narrative like smoke—photographs their tryst and sells the negatives to a tabloid mogul. The scandal erupts; husband, magistrate and father, now must preside over his own family’s moral ruin in open court. The script, coiled like a watch-spring by Beate Schach and visual virtuoso Karl Grune, refuses any redemptive catharsis: instead it interrogates the audience with the biblical admonition of the title. Characters walk toward the camera as though petitioning the viewer for clemency, then recede into chiaroscuro corridors where guilt is the only illumination. No character is murdered, yet every soul is left fatally wounded by public revelation; the final shot freezes on Margarete’s blurred silhouette behind a frosted glass door, her fate ambiguous as she vanishes into the anonymous metropolis.

Synopsis