‘You Are the Only Person Who Can Give Me Back Myself’: The Passions of Self-image and Ego Distortion—Der Liebeswunsch [The Love Wish] (D 2006)

This paper elaborates on the stagings of the feminine in Torsten C. Fischer’s 2006 film Der Liebeswunsch, which is a novel adaptation of Dieter Wellershoff’s work of the same name. Thematically, the film revolves around the amorous entanglements of two established middle-class couples, at the end of which Anja, the youngest of the quartet, commits suicide. On the manifest level, the film reconstructs the pathologically based derailment of a young woman out of unrequited love, who first falls prey to alcohol and finally commits suicide. The article also elaborates the thesis that love’s desire stages, as it were en miniature, the existential questioning and threat scenarios of a romantic love utopia, which in essence negotiates the radicalisation of freedom, equality and recognition within the order of gender relations on the one hand and a radical splitting of sexuality and emotionality on the other in contemporary modernity.