FEATURE FILM / 1980

The Proud and Sad Life of Mathias Kneißl

The beginning of the end is starting now

The Robber Mathias Kneißl became a legend in Bavaria. The film is based on the historical criminal case and describes the last year of the rebel and folk hero. At the age of 23, he is released from prison, where he has served an unreasonably harsh six-year sentence. When this becomes known, he loses his job as a carpenter and now wants to emigrate to America with his girlfriend. He hopes to earn the money for the journey by committing crimes. In the process, he fatally wounds a gendarme. Despite this, Mathias Kneißl does not leave the area and stays in the Dachau hinterland. Only when his girlfriend betrays him is he able to find his hiding place. The farm was besieged by 300 police officers for days and then shot up. Kneißl was seriously injured and treated in a clinic in Munich before being beheaded in Augsburg in 1902.