With Hildegard Knef through the BVG strike

“We recommend that you check in time to check which connections you can best get to the venues,” the Berlinale writes to me. So I check the best connection to the House of Berlin Festival, where I want to see a documentary about Hildegard Knef, who is always looking for new hope. She moved to the wide world from Berlin. I can hike through Berlin.

Why does our world get out of hand? The Berlinale shows many answers if we want to see them – and do not avoid the most important question: Why do we whine so much, especially we? The films from the wide world show how many worlds out there are much more brutal to the people who are supposed to live in them. They show us the faces drowning refugees, the fear of survival of farmers in wide steppes, to whom their animals are stolen, the grief that must not love those they long for. And it shows the unconditional will of the people to always look for their hopes. On that not only to experience your own, but also the wide world, especially the longest in all of us.

Diamond is 15 and is to be married. But on the big day the girl is in her bed in the Senegalese capital Dakar and continues to sleep, she breathes up and down, just don’t wake up, no matter how much it gets too late. She sleeps when children shake her, her parents beat her when the doctor called up desperately, she even sleeps as the house begins to burn when the brutal world around her tries to save himself from her flames. She doesn’t want to wake up in it anyway.

Whenever I come out of the cinema and have seen a little of the wide world, I no longer see ours so tight. The subway will run again in two days. “I had a wonderful dream,” says Diamant, after she is awakened again. And I sing in running: happiness should behave gently. It should manage my fate with love.