The Story:
In the war-torn year of 1943, in a sleepy German town in the Hunsrück, two restless housewives—Toni Simon (Elke Sommer) and Marga Kröber (Hannelore Elsner)—endure the drudgery of rationed life while their husbands fight at the front, their spirits unbroken by illegal pig-slaughtering escapades and a growing doubt in the Reich’s promised triumph; at a jubilant festival honoring a hero pilot, Toni uncovers a hidden stash of cash in an attic cigar box, igniting their wild scheme to escape to the fabled City of Dreams, Vienna, before their fortune turns to dust.
But the road to romance is riddled with betrayal: aboard the rattling train, sly speculator Mariu Moltenau (Ferdy Mayne) cons Toni out of their hard-won wealth, and upon arrival, Vienna reveals itself not as a glittering escape but a shadowed shell of wartime cynicism, where a tantalizing night with a decorated Knight’s Cross wearer crumbles into heartache upon discovering his wedded bliss, leaving the duo penniless and profoundly disillusioned.
Returning to face grim reckoning for their porcine pilfering, the cunning pair turns the tables on the pompous local Nazi leader (Mario Adorf), ensnaring him in scandal to silence the charges— a biting satire of wartime folly, where dreams of waltzes and whispers yield only the harsh echo of reality’s unyielding march.
