“Diary of a Lover, about a butcher's frustrated love life, deal(s) with the alienation and loneliness of city life. (It) takes up where Time of Maturity (his earlier film, also shot in West Berlin), left off: it deals with the same individual, Michael Bauer, now a grown man, and shows how hopelessly lost his situation was, and is, although he appears to function in society as a useful, occupied citizen. This is a fiction documentary commenting on life in general in enlightening but pessimistic terms.

“Bauer is slowly going mad. Played by Klaus Salge (a TV filmmaker himself), this is recorded in varying nuances of movement, stance and gesture, often reduced to a photographic reality of intensity and contrast. How he goes, rather unperturbed, through his world is fascinating to follow... any reader of Poe, Gogol, Camus and others will be entranced at the faithfulness to a thread of a theme, and lines are also out to Hitchcock and Chabrol, who have fascinated audiences with much the same story... psychologically true and penetrating.”