Schlußakkord

Schlußakkord (Final Accord or better Final Chord; sometimes anglicised Schlussakkord) is a German film melodrama of the Nazi period, the first melodrama directed by Detlef Sierck, who later had a career in Hollywood as Douglas Sirk and specialised in melodramas. It was made under contract for Universum Film AG (UFA), stars Lil Dagover and Willy Birgel and also features Maria von Tasnady, and premièred in 1936. It shows stylistic features later developed by Sierck/Sirk and makes symbolic and thematic use of music.

Production took place from February to April 1936. The film had two premières, on June 27, 1936 at the annual cinema owners' convention in Dresden and on July 24, 1936 at the Gloria-Palast in Berlin, after which it was placed on general release.

At a New Year's Eve party in New York, Hanna Müller (Maria von Tasnady) is informed that her husband has been found dead in Central Park, presumably a suicide. The couple had left Germany because he had embezzled money. Meanwhile, the young son they left behind in an orphanage, Peter, is adopted by Erich Garvenberg (Willy Birgel), a famous conductor, and his wife Charlotte (Lil Dagover), who is having an affair with an astrologer, Gregor Carl-Otto. Hanna Müller goes to the orphanage to enquire after her son and Erich Garvenberg hires her as a nanny. They grow close through their love for the boy. Charlotte Garvenberg learns of Müller's husband's criminality and fires her. Müller returns to abduct her son, but Charlotte, who is being blackmailed by Carl-Otto, overdoses on morphine and dies. Müller administered the drug and is suspected of murder, but at the trial a maid reveals that Charlotte had said she was committing suicide. Hanna and Erich Garvenberg can now marry.

The film contrasts American with German culture and "a decadent past" (the Weimar Republic) with a "healthy, hopeful present" (the Third Reich) that reaffirms the values of the "old" (pre-Weimar) Germany. The interiors, by Erich Kettelhut, a co-designer on Metropolis, have symbolic force; in particular, Charlotte Garvenberg is surrounded by mirrors, suggesting narcissism, preoccupied with her own happiness at the expense of her husband or other integration into society, so that her fate in the film "in a way, rehearses the conditions under which [Weimar] culture came to an end", in selfishness, "erotic obsessions" and "empty rituals". In contrast Erich Garvenberg and Hanna are both guided by duty, and Garvenberg is a decisive leader and Hanna is able to draw strength from her rootedness in German culture and her healthy maternal feelings.