This companion work to Die Mörder sind unter uns, chokes on its despair, just as the earlier film is cautiously filled with hope – it feels like a farewell to cinema, to history, and for the main character, to life itself. Zwischengleis’s English title Yesterday’s Tomorrow is a stroke of melancholic genius. Staudte himself talked about that connection and how the two films relate to each other: if Die Mörder sind unter uns was about the ruins around then, Zwischengleis is about the ruins within, the ones that couldn’t be erased by new construction work. If Susanne back then could slowly overcome her concentration camp memories to prevent Hans from taking justice into his own hands, here Anna cannot forget that she couldn’t protect a strange boy in the mad final days of WWII when she was fleeing the approaching Soviet Army with her mother and younger brother. She’s a prisoner, caught in a timeloop in her head, it’s not an accident that her name is a palindrome. Wars take everything away from her: for her one true love Charles Stone, a colonel with the occupation forces, is sent to the battlefields of Korea, never to return. And what has peace to offer? An insurance agent for a second husband whose economic-miracle mindset leaves her feeling more alone than she ever was. In 1961, Anna commits suicide by jumping from a bridge. That is a not a spoiler. The film’s FRG poster showed that moment as a vision in Anna’s head, making it very clear that this is a film about a woman thinking about taking her life – and maybe by doing so taking charge again of her destiny?
Zwischengleis was barely seen back in 1978. The film screened in Cannes’s Marché du Film, without subtitles, if reports from the period are to be trusted. In cinemas, it came and went. The press grumbled. People cared even less about the film than people in the film cared about Anna. She, at least, had Charles Stone for a short while. But what about Staudte?

Olaf Möller