‘Die letzte Reise’ by Florian Baxmeyer

The 76-year-old retired teacher Katharina Krohn, who lives in Hamburg, no longer wants to live and decides to travel to Zurich to take her own life with the help of an assisted suicide organisation. Her wish to die is motivated on the one hand by physical ailments, namely severe arthritis and a chronic lung disease. On the other hand, she strictly rejects an end of life in a nursing home and does not want to have to ‘vegetate‘ at the end of her life, but to do so in ‘her right mind‘. However, her wish to die at the present time is probably mainly a consequence of the loss of her husband at an unspecified, probably rather recent, point in time, without whom she sees no value in life. Dr Jovet, the physician who is examining her request for assisted suicide for the Swiss organisation, accepts it. Katharina’s two daughters learn, by chance, of their mother’s intention to die. Both speak out against it – her daughter, Heike, even tries to prevent it by taking her mother to court, where she argues that she lacks the mental capacity to make this decision. However, Katharina convinces the judge of her mental capacity and at the end of the film travels to Zurich. Whether she takes the final step remains open, but is strongly suggested by the last scene which shows her together with Dr Jovet.

The film was created at a time when physician-assisted suicide was de facto prevented by Section 217 of the German Criminal Code (2015). This legal restriction is reflected in the film, as Katharina has to travel to Switzerland where assisted suicide was legal. Through the impact of Katharina's wish to die on her daughters, the film strongly reflects the socio-ethical argument that relatives suffer from suicide. Nevertheless, it presents Katharina's individual ethical right to an assisted death as legitimate: she is demonstrably capable of judgement, the viewers experience her as wise and reflective, her wish to die is enduring and obviously autonomous. Katharina expresses her existential suffering caused by a rupture that separates her life into a beautiful before and an unbearable after that no longer has any value. Several physical ailments visibly limit her quality of life; arthritis makes painting, and thus Katharina's passion, impossible. The rupture in her life is caused primarily by the loss of her husband, which becomes clear at the points where the film opens up an inner perspective in Katharina, through inner monologues, but above all through inner images. It is these subjectively designed passages that make the existential dimension of Katharina's suffering vivid, so that the audience – and also Jovet himself, who finally prescribes her the fatal drug – can understand her decision to die. The film thus advocates for more liberal legislation in Germany, without simplistically endorsing the individual right to self-determination; instead, it raises awareness of the social interconnectedness of assisted dying. This ambivalence was repeatedly emphasized in the film's reviews.