A strong believer in Lenin, and for many years a member of the German Communist Party, Elsner was one of the most radical satirical writers in West Germany and had won the Prix Formentor in 1964.

[2] In real life, Gisela Elsner did not kill herself until nearly three years had passed after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[3][4] In the autumn of 1989, in her Munich bungalow, the writer Hanna Flanders (Hannelore Elsner) watches the Berlin Wall coming down on television.

Now, she is badly shaken by the news from Berlin, mainly for ideological reasons: the chance of Lenin's utopian ideas taking root in West Germany is now much less likely.

Hanna, who has financial problems, decides to move to Berlin to observe the events there at first hand, and arranges the removal of her belongings, which costs most of her remaining money.

One employee tells Hanna she is "a spoilt cow from the West" who never understood East Germany and only believed in it because it published her books.

Not long ago, Joachim, her once-lover and mentor, told her that if she wanted to move to East Germany he would get her a place to live, but when Hanna reminds him of this he says "times have changed dramatically".

One of them recognizes her and says "You're that Flanders woman who didn't understand the first thing about our political reality aside from some champagne receptions in Moscow!"

Despite her heavily painted eyes and Cleopatra-style black wig, Hanna is recognized by a drunken schoolteacher, Dieter (Bernd Stempel), who approaches her and says he has read and taught all her books.

Her mother (Helga Göring) is hostile, but her father (Charles Régnier) is more understanding and gives her five hundred Deutsche Mark.

Coming away, she goes to the Nuremberg Central Station, where she runs into her first husband, Bruno (Vadim Glowna), who had to bring up their son on his own.

Hanna goes on to Munich on her own and gets into her bungalow, but it is empty, as her furniture is on its way to Berlin, so she has to sleep on the floor on top of the belongings in her luggage.

The New York Times critic A. O. Scott found it "a fascinating document of filial ambivalence - raw, merciless and yet ultimately tender, clearly driven by the need to make sense of an enigmatic and overpowering figure".

[6] Johannes von Moltke noted that Hannelore Elsner had depicted Hanna Flanders as constantly ill at ease with her surroundings, unable to sit still, a chain smoker with no other way to calm her hands, and "a peripatetic protagonist on an errant journey across Germany", engaged in "a fruitless attempt to regain her footing in a world out of joint".

Without using flashbacks, director Oskar Roehler, the son of Gisela Elsner, makes the interior and exterior political circumstances of this Life understandable.

The film, a balancing act of critical-tender distance, proves in all respects artistically impressive and exciting.