Inge Herold (Christine Schorn) seems to have both feet firmly on the ground. She lives with her adolescent son in a comfortable flat, right on Alexanderplatz. As a psychologist at a “Marriage and Family Counselling” clinic, she helps married couples solve their relationship crises. She sees her own divorce as a triumph of her independence. She expertly handles the various cases that pile up in her office, believing she is above such petty family conflicts. But within a matter of minutes her self-image disintegrates. After a routine examination Inge finds herself in waiting rooms once again, but, now an unsure woman seeking help, takes a seat on the other side of the desk. The examination found a lump in her breast and her doctor briefly explains the next steps of her treatment: tissue removal, possibly followed immediately by operation, removal of the affected breast. The news throws Inge completely off kilter. She is supposed to report to the hospital the very next day. After her initial shock Inge finds unusual ways to fill the remaining hours. She makes a few apparently irrational purchases, visits her mother, contacts former school friends she has not seen for years, meets a friend from West Berlin and finally, sits for a long time at a festively set table, waiting in vain for her lover to arrive. Remarkably, in all her encounters, Inge never mentions her illness or the impending operation to any of these people she is close to.

The cancer diagnosis in APPREHENSION suddenly makes death an almost tangible reality. Through the protagonist, this invasion of the unimaginable into everyday life becomes incredibly powerful. By virtue of her professional standing and self-image, Inge feels she is above petty conflicts and problems. Suddenly she realizes that she is susceptible to very concrete and existential fears. This fundamental “apprehension” feeds on the tacit repression of illness and death by the everyday consciousness in modern societies. To a certain extent Inge is part of these repressive mechanisms, in that her job transforms conflict resolutions into a kind of service. The various stages she goes through in the evening prior to her operation become a journey back to the banalities of a “perfectly normal life”, banalities she believed she was above. She accepts this process of understanding as a road to loneliness without locking herself away in the horror of her situation.

In his seventh feature film, director Lothar Warneke addresses a subject which was widely taboo, not only in the GDR. As a former theologian, he does this with great precision, avoids adopting an omniscient stance or making excessively optimistic prognoses. However, he depicts his heroine’s journey with such candour that the film is in no way a pessimistic excursion into the inevitability of illness and death. Her story unfolds in the form of a long flashback, framed by two scenes played out in the time following her operation: Inge’s illness and her mastectomy have transformed the way she sees her life.

Warneke “hired out” a renowned documentary cameraman for APPREHENSION in the form of Thomas Plenert, who established his reputation chiefly through his work on Jürgen Böttcher’s major films. Plenert’s black-and-white, precise photography, often shot spontaneously, is an integral part of the film’s authenticity. This, combined with Warneke’s decision to film in real doctors’ surgeries, offices and flats, rather than in a studio, produces a consistency of form and content very rarely seen in DEFA films.

Production Period

1981/1982

Production Year

1982

color

b/w

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Relationship / Family, Psychology, GDR, Socialism / Communism, Equal Rights / Emancipation

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Italian (it), Russian (ru), Chinese (zh), Arabic (ar), Japanese (ja), Turkish (tr), German (de)

Note on the Format

Parallewelt: Film - Ein Einblick in die DEFA