Kluge's prize-winning first feature is based on a legal case he encountered as an attorney and which he initially fictionalized in his book, Curricula Vitae. It concerns Anita G. (splendidly played by the filmmaker's sister Alexandra in her screen debut), a young Jewish refugee from the East, who wanders around the Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder in search of work, a home and love. Her plight is directly connected to the ethos of the 1950s, when legitimate pride in the country's material reconstruction suppressed the sad fact that Germany's moral reconstruction had failed to keep pace. A judge rejects the obvious possibility that Anita's experiences under the Nazis and later under the Communists might have played a role in her delinquency and sentences her to jail for petty theft. Well-meaning but uncomprehending social workers compound her sense of alienation and provoke her to flee. Affairs with several lovers leave her alone, pregnant and in prison... That the past continues to burden the Federal Republic's present becomes the film's major theme, strikingly represented by the meandering narrative as well as by montage digressions figuring Anita's fearful dreams and memories of a happier childhood. Stuart Liebman