In April 1920, the Bavarian writer Lena Christ put an end to her own life in the Munich Waldfriedhof. The film tells the story of the tragic life of this unhappy woman.

“The troubled life and romantic death of the waitress, nun and writer who was illegitimate, mistreated by her own mother, and married twice”- is the film’s subtitle. It tells the story of Lena Christ’s life based on her autobiographical novel „Memories
of a Redundant Person” and the book written by her husband, Peter Benedix „The
Life of Lena Christ”.

The title role is played by Heidi Stroh, her mother by Edith Volkmann and her husband by Eberhard Peiker. “The film translates Lena Christ’s simple autobiography, partly into a
kind of mannerist artificiality, partly into a ‘Chamber of Horrors’ of inhuman suffering. In spite of these alienation effects, it remains a harrowing account of a victim of zeitgeist and prejudice” (International Film Lexicon).

Hans W. Geißendörfer comments: “My film is neither a sentimental work, nor a dialect piece. What interests me is the authoritarian structure of the environment that shaped
this particular fate”.

Geißendörfer’s spectacular debut film “The Case of Lena Christ” was made in 1968/69 as an in-house production of Bayerisches Fernsehen. The subsequent masterpieces of the then 27-year-old – the idiosyncratic vampire film “Jonathan” (1969), which was awarded a German Film Award in Silver, his version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Carlos”, which he turned into a Western drama, the impressive, multi-award-winning adaptation of Ludwig Anzengruber’s “Sternsteinhof”, and the psychological thriller „The Glass Cell” (1977), based on the eponymous novel by Patricia Highsmith, which was nominated for the Oscar for foreign films – were also made as co-productions with Bayerisches Fernsehen.

Source: Film im Bayerischen Fernsehen