In 1943, while the Allies are bombing Berlin and the Gestapo is purging the capital of Jews, a dangerous love affair blossoms between two women – one a Jewish member of the underground, the other an exemplar of Nazi motherhood.
The Lübeck merchant Friedemann owes his crippled figure to a wet nurse "devoted to drink". He lives a secluded life with his three simple-minded sisters and his bedridden mother, loving only the theater and music. Only Gerda, the unhappy wife of the district commander of Rinnlingen, makes him...
Based on the records of the Nuremberg trial of the chemical giant IG Farben; a story about the collaboration between international corporations and Nazi scientists, whose research contributed to the death of millions. The chemist Dr. Hans Scholz lives through a tortuous political transformation...
In 1914 Berlin, bank heiress Leonore Wahl and struggling Munich student Werner Bertin fall passionately in love, defying class and her parents’ expectations. Their idyll is shattered by the outbreak of WWI: Werner, swept up in patriotic fervor, is conscripted to the Western Front, while Leonore,...
An idealistic teacher is shocked to discover her pupils are already cynical and opportunistic. Her colleague soon grows resentful when she uses new and challenging techniques to help her students overcome obstacles.
A train travels through the vastness of Russia, a train with German prisoners of war returning home, and Viktor Kleist, a young German communist from an intellectual home in Munich, travels back home with them. During the journey, the stations on his way to Lenin wake up again.
Lydia Kowalenko is fired from the pharmaceutical company where she has worked for many years because she refused to help cover up the use of a dangerous chemical. Her daughter Katja, however, has no scruples and risks an operation which is more beneficial to her own medical research than to the...
The ship stoker Heini Holler leaves Greece for health reasons and reports to the consulate of fascist Germany. The consul sends him back to Hamburg. He had previously reported him to the Gestapo there as politically suspicious. On his arrival, Holler is immediately arrested. His comrades kidnap the...
The wrenching story of a woman sentenced in 1934 to ten years in prison for antifascist activities. The love between her and her fiancée enables her to survive the tribulations of her time in prison, where she is one of few political prisoners.
Anne Treibel owns a small house that is home to four women and one man, Martin, a badly injured war veteran. All the women are interested in Martin, but he knows that only Anne truly loves him. When Helga asks him to get a surgery that could save his life, he does it for Anne. Fortunately, the...
Murat, a Turkish gay youth living in Berlin’s Turkish ghetto, decides to come out to his family. What he doesn’t know yet is that his family has even bigger secrets to hide.
The paths of many people cross before Christmas Eve. Each of them has their own special story to tell on this day... On the morning of December 24, the doctor at the children's clinic leaves the hospital with a happy heart. The parents of little Matthias have reconciled with each other. As a...
Two doctors, a German and a Czech brain surgeon, meet in a Berlin hospital, unaware of how fatefully they are linked by events from a dark past. A trip to a congress in Prague and an encounter with the wife of his Czech colleague force the German chief surgeon to rethink his previous life. The film...
In the nineteenth century, seventeen year old Effi Briest is married to the older Baron von Instetten and moves into a house that she believes has a ghost.
Four directors - four styles - four episodes, all relating the events of a single night which has entered the history books: August 12-13, 1961. There are thousands of complex narratives connected with the frontier drawn through the middle of Berlin, and each episode relates the story of a...
In Chicago of the 1920s, crime gangs are fighting a bitter battle for power. Gangster boss Bill Cracker plans a bank robbery with his cronies in Bill's Ballhouse just as the ladies of the Salvation Army enter. Among them is the magical Lilian, who Bill immediately falls for. This has an impact on...
