Farewell

Set almost entirely in a Berlin apartment, this 1930 film follows a young couple during the final hours before their separation. Peter (Aribert Mog), an unemployed writer, and his lover Hella (Brigitte Horney) have realized that their relationship has broken down due to financial worries and emotional exhaustion. As she packs her things and makes preparations to move out, a relentless exchange of accusations, memories, and shattered hopes unfolds. In conversations that oscillate between bitterness, tenderness, and indifference, it becomes clear how much they have lived past one another. Small observations of daily life, glances out the window, neighbors in the stairwell, and the casual sounds of the city reinforce the feeling of loneliness and stagnation. Robert Siodmak stages a couple’s farewell as a condensed moment of existential emptiness: what shatters is not only a romantic relationship, but also a life plan. Formally remarkable is the sensitive use of sound film, which was still in its infancy at the time: dialogues feel natural, pauses and sounds take on meaning, and the characters remain vulnerable and ordinary. “Abschied” uses sound not illustratively, but psychologically—as a means of making distance and alienation palpable. “Abschied,” Robert Siodmak’s first sound film after “Menschen am Sonntag” and a short film, occupies a key position within his oeuvre. Stylistically, the film stands at the threshold between the New Objectivity-style observation of everyday life in the Weimar Republic and the psychological realism that Siodmak would later develop—in exile and particularly in American film noir. Themes such as disillusionment, isolation, and emotional hopelessness are already clearly established here. In the context of early 1930s German cinema, “Abschied” can be read as a counterpoint to escapist entertainment films. Instead of distraction, the film offers a ruthless assessment of modern relationships in an urban, anonymous society. In this respect, it resembles works by Pabst or early films by Billy Wilder, with whom Siodmak also had personal ties. Historically, “Abschied” gains additional significance due to the time of its creation: made shortly before the watershed of 1933, the film seems, in retrospect, like a farewell not only to a love, but to an entire cultural epoch of German cinema. Its melancholic undertone can also be read as a foreshadowing of the impending social rupture.