This is a fundamentally ambiguous film. Initially, there is a seductive lightness about the images. Asta Nielsen plays the part of a dedicated journalist, an intellectual, full of temperament, and amusing in her striped dress. While having her breakfast on the roof of the Ullstein publishing house building, a colleague proposes marriage to the young journalist, after which they take a walk together through the lively streets of Berlin. But what seems like a cheerful romance among journalists is interspersed from the very start with scenes of illness, poverty, and death. The different moods and themes which the film assembles are held together only loosely by the plot: the story of the journalist Sonja Waler (Asta Nielsen), who intercedes on behalf of a penniless researcher. To enable him to continue his research, she murders a rich usurer, for which crime she is sentenced to prison. Asta Nielsen traverses the film’s scenes, holding them all together. The figure of Raskolnikov is the second thread that runs through the story. The film takes up and adapts several features of the literary work. Here too, as a year later in Hamlet, Asta Nielsen appropriates a heroic role from literature which is traditionally played by a man.

Sabine Nessel