She wears the black Balmain dress, the wild mane with the bangs, the green eyes painted black, the broad laugh on her flat face. The voice: deep as night, harsh, scratched, robust. The language: practiced in the New Objectivity of a Kästner and Tucholsky, slim and lanky, clever, self-ironic. The music: between chanson and jazz.

She was not born in Berlin, but in 1925 in Ulm, yet she was Berlin through and through with skin, hair, and heart. Real and intimidatingly straightforward, a woman with an apron, but also cosmopolitan, without being a lady.

Knef (in the USA 'Neff', which sounds even more like a whip lash) was a person in her contradictions: fear of being alone, fear of fame, fear of losing it and not doing it justice. "Before I go on stage, I always want to have a profession with a pension and go home at five". The intoxication, however, when it works on stage, she records, is "a masculine victory".

In the year of her 100th birthday, we experience Hilde Knef at rehearsals, in the recording studio and at home, in conversations that are never 08/15, see her in photographs and film scenes, hear her texts (with the narrative voice of Nina Kunzendorf), supplemented by contemporary historical film images. And we meet in the very personal, yet unobtrusive film collage by her daughter Christina, who in her thoughtful intelligence is a gift for the film and its director. She keeps her distance while being very close. In the parental home, there was no daily routine, but it always depended on whether or what was being worked on at the moment. "She always wanted to do more." Knef also understood her professions as "escape routes" to "control tensions, to discipline, to polarize". And she transformed herself multiple times: "Changeability is the most constant thing in our lives."

This includes her marriages: the first short one with the Jewish American Kurt Hirsch; the second with the Englishman David 'Tonio' Cameron, her life and work partner and manager, also connected in the ruthless demand ("our work was a duel"); the third with the much younger, supportive Paul von Schell until her death in 2002.

Knef's life and careers seek in their oscillation between ups and downs, success and failure, being hated and loved their equals. Even in the war rubble, the first new female film star with Wolfgang Staudte's "The Murderers are Among Us"; the call from America that fades away as she is parked there for three years (she calls it "stupidity and naivety"); return for Willi Forst's film "The Sinner", whose scandal stamps her as the outcast. What should she – deeply unsettled – do in the staid, repressed, forgetful Bonn Republic? Out again, once more to the USA! Fabulous triumph with "Silk Stockings", the musical version of "Ninotchka", on Broadway. Cole Porter advises her to sing. The singer Knef surpasses the actress Knef. She creates evergreens: "For me, it should rain red roses", "From now on, it went downhill", "I don't need Venice". In parallel, she shoots less significant films with significant directors. In the 1970s, she writes her autobiographical book about her own generation shaped by the fall from grace of Auschwitz: "The Gift Horse" becomes an international bestseller.

She grew beyond Germany – like two other artists of the 20th century. But unlike these, the older Marlene Dietrich and the younger Romy Schneider, Hildegard Knef returned to Germany again. To act, to sing, to write, to paint, to think publicly. Her talent and uncalculated ambition, her style, her courage, impatience, rebelliousness, and her discipline were second to none..

Knef remains, in everything she does, the public figure. As such, she summarizes and shares her illnesses and dozens of surgeries, the diagnosis of cancer ("The Judgment"), divorce, dependencies and addictions, her motherhood. She is the resilient woman who says, "Life owes us nothing but life, everything else we have to do". Thus, she is an embodiment of Germany – could and should be again today.