Helma Sanders-Brahms’s controversial saga about the plight of German women during and after the war opens with the voices of two women: Bertolt Brecht’s daughter, who reads the poem for which the film is named ("Let others speak of their own disgrace, I speak of mine . . ."); and the director herself, who as the character Anna begins to tell the story of her own mother. It begins in 1939 with the brief courtship and marriage of a young German couple, and moves on to the wife’s life of deprivation and courage during her husband’s absence in the war and her tremendous difficulty in reintegrating into the postwar culture, reinfused with male presence.