Berlin winters are cold. The coldest in the records had mean temperatures of minus five degrees, plus cold records on individual days, such as in 1929, when minus 26 degrees were measured in Berlin-Dahlem. It became similarly icy on a February night in 2012 when the temperature in parts of the capital fell to minus 24 degrees. Last winter, the Federal Homeless Aid Association counted 23 people who died from the cold on Germany’s streets.
In the very cold winter of 2012 in Berlin, one of them was a homeless man whom TV producer Beatrice Kramm knew. The ZDF film On thin ice is based on this personal story of Kramm. The producer found the man in her parking lot, where he was looking for a sheltered place. “We tried in vain to get in touch with him and offered him help – he wanted to be left alone. The man died in temperatures below 15 degrees – we still don’t know anything about him to this day,” reports Kramm. With the film she wants to “give him a story”.
She gives him socks and cocoa, but he hasn’t waited for a rescuer
Unlike in reality, the homeless in the ZDF film is a man by name: Konrad. He set up camp in the underground parking lot of the cook Ira Rosenthal (Julia Koschitz), who accidentally drives him over there one evening. This is how the slow rapprochement between women with their home, children and work and the man who owns little more than a dog begins. She drives him to the doctor and covers her nose in disgust in the car. He refuses to go to an emergency shelter. She gives him socks, cocoa and a new jacket, and has to justify herself to her ex.
Konrad, the homeless, is given a name in the film, but his story is inconclusive even in fiction (director: Sabine Bernardi, script: Silke Zertz). One can criticize that, but in the end, within the framework of what a ZDF television film can achieve, it is again consistent that you only get to know Konrad through Ira. Only from the perspective of a woman, for whom he becomes an annoying, then somehow meaningful marginal figure in a life with enough other problems.
But Konrad has not been waiting for a rescuer, nor, to Ira’s greatest disappointment, is interested in a new start. Anyone can become homeless, he once said. This logic follows On thin ice for a while. When Ira finally loses her job as a cook, that should of course represent how fragile her bourgeois life is. But things are more complicated, and the film doesn’t leave that out.
By the way, played by Carlo Ljubek, this Konrad never really looks like a person who lives on the street, but mostly like an attractive actor with a bent posture and a winter jacket from the current season that has been rubbed with a little dust. Visually impressive On thin ice not, but he does have a few good moments.
“Why are you doing this anyway?” asks Konrad Ira when she wants him good again. “So that you disappear again,” she replies, seemingly ironic. In the end, that’s the most honest sentence that comes up in this film.
On thin ice, ZDF, Monday, 8.15 p.m.