Die Verfehlung plot
In a village in the GDR, fifty-year-old Elisabeth, a widow who just keeps her head above water by cleaning the town hall, meets Jacob in 1988, a simple but well-paid dock worker from Hamburg. On New Year's Eve, the happy Elisabeth announces that she has become engaged to Jacob and that they hope to get married soon. This sets in motion the heartless and arbitrary machinery of the communist bureaucracy of the totalitarian state. Jacob is expelled from the country and is no longer allowed to enter the GDR. Elisabeth's son is arrested and she herself is fired. She is distraught and does not know how to survive. She decides to take revenge on the mayor, who started the terror in the name of the state. She shoots him dead.