Summary

Wilhelm Pabst hosts a late dinner at Dreiturm for his sons, their friend Boris, and his collaborators, including the ministry official Kuno Krämer, the screenwriter Kurt Heuser, the cameraman Franz Wilzek, and the actor Werner Krauss. Over soup and wine, Krämer boasts about an English writer he has coerced into recording radio broadcasts, presenting the arrangement as civilized while also bragging that it funds itself through royalties the state has frozen and redirected. Jerzabek’s daughters serve the meal and flirt with the men, turning the table into a tense mix of politeness, sexual charge, and fear. Krauss drifts between lucidity and confusion, and the gathering keeps trying to treat itself as an ordinary professional meeting even while everyone senses the danger outside the castle walls.

Two men in leather coats enter, introduce themselves as Karsunke and Basler, and behave as if...