n his first feature film, Tankred Dorst, a leading German dramatist and writer, treats the subject of incest in such a way as to engender understanding, if not sympathy, for the accused father. A beer truck driver nicknamed Iron Hands (Eisenhans) because of his great physical strength, lives in an isolated village in upper Franconia, near the East-West German border, with his wife and two daughters: Hilde, a hairdresser in a nearby town who spends the weekends at home, and Marga, a retarded girl just reaching sexual maturity. In his youth, Eisenhans tempered his brute strength by overprotecting the weakling schoolmate who is now his employer. As an adult, often drunk and brutal, he directs his protective side toward his daughter, Marga, whose company he far prefers to that of his wife. As he begins to spend more and more time with her, becoming obviously obsessed with her new sexuality, neighbors intervene to separate him from the only person for whom he holds any real feeling.
Shot in black and white and steeped in its locality (the characters speak the local dialect), Eisenhans is nevertheless not a realistic film. Rather, its environment becomes what director Dorst calls “an inner, emotional landscape,” much like that presented in the Grimms fairy tales after which Dorst fashioned his sense of reality in the film. There is a Grimms character named Eisenhans, “a large, strong man at the bottom of a pond. A wild man, but not actually good or bad,” according to Dorst, who continues: “The images in fairy tales contain symbols and riddles for our lives.” Eisenhans is an ominous fairy tale... Shrill colors, hellish moments, malignant dream images. I've known the landscape and the dark villages of the story since my childhood (he was born some 20 km from the area).... Today the border is there carving up the mountains, woods, meadows, rivers. And in this cut-off edge of Germany, houses crumble, trees buckle, streets decay as at the end of time.”