Otto Graf

The delightful Johann Strauss comic opera Die Fledermaus was mercilessly lampooned in this truly bizarre production. For starters, a framing device has been added: After appearing in 300 consecutive appearances of Fledermaus (which translates as The Bat) the lead tenor (Georg Alexander) imagines that he's seeing bats everywhere. Driven a bit over the edge by all this, he falls asleep and has a nightmare about the opera, with a group of non-singers cast in the leading roles. The original libretto about romantic assignations, political imprisonments and mistaken identity is burlesqued to the hilt: at one point, the hero finds out that his prison cell is surrounded by rubber tubes!

Bruno Stiegler, a boxing promoter with a disreputable past, returns from America to Berlin to make some big things again with his friends. Fatally, he is always preceded by some gentlemen from better circles who are developing amazing criminal activity in their old days. They are led by Oberlandesgerichtsrat a. D. Herbert Zänker, whom it still hisses, that he could bring in his term Bruno never behind bars.

Klaus is a young man in post-war Berlin. He is drawn to his friend Manfred and, under the encouragement of their acquaintance, Dr. Winkler, explore the underground world of gay clubs and electronic music. His family begins to learn of his other life and do everything they can to set him straight.

In 1920, an unknown 24-year-old woman was fished out of Berlin's Landwehr kanal after a suicide attempt. Since she has no papers and no answers to any questions, they soon assign them to the insane asylum Dallendorf. A co-patient believes she recognizes the Czar's daughter Anastasia Romanowa - who apparently was the only one who survived the murder of the tsar's family in 1918.

German chancellor Otto von Bismarck promises the dying emperor Wilhelm I. to be loyal to his grandson. But the gap between young Kaiser Wilhelm II. and old Bismarck is rapidly widening. It soon appears that an era is coming to an end.

Endspurt

Director Wolfgang Staudte who left East Germany in 1953 to make movies in West Germany, takes a few swipes at the West German judicial system in this fairly effective courtroom drama about the murder of a four-month-old baby. Police almost immediately arrest the mother Ingrid who is the mistress of the father, a rich business VIP married to another woman. His position and wealth keep him insulated from suspicion. A hot-shot lawyer has to overcome the unaccountably biased perceptions of the police, the judge, the prosecutor and almost everyone else in the judicial system. The defence lawyer, driven to an extreme, knows he has to find the real killer or his client will be convicted.

Country Dr. Robert Koch is desperate: a tuberculosis epidemic is decimating the children in his district and no one is able to do anything about it. Every fourth child is already sick and the parents must helplessly watch as their young ones die. Now Koch is undertaking to find the cause of the tuberculosis --- something he has already been working on for years --- which has been causing this plague of illness. His work is made more difficult by envy; for example, that of his teacher, who was wounded defending his honor. But his greatest obstacle is the famous Berliner scientist and Reichstag deputy, Privy Councilor Rudolf Virchow: He is extraordinarily skeptical of Koch's theory, that the cause for tuberculosis is a bacteria.

A biographical film of Otto von Bismarck, the Prime Minister of Prussia, and how he and his policies - including aggressive war - helped to unite Germany.

This 1936 film tells the story of the doings of foreign agents in Germany and their allies among the German population. Having placed an ad in a local paper looking for "contact with bigwigs in German industry", enemy agents Morris and Geyer end up making contact with an engineer named Brockau. Brockau has developed an improvement in turning oil into gasoline and that's just what these enemy agents are looking for. Brockau, for his part, needs money, because his girlfriend is a selfish cow who demands more and more toys and trinkets, which has put our naive little nerd deep into debt. Brockau, however, is not the only unwitting maroon to fall into the clutches of the evil agents: the former bank agent Hans Klemm, now doing his service in the Wehrmacht, ends up being contacted by an agent from the other side and ends up getting blackmailed into working for them.

Der Fall Pinedus

1913

Die Wirtin zum weißen Röss'l

Historical drama portraying the life of German baroque architect Andreas Schlüter.

Novemberverbrecher - Eine Erinnerung

A 1968 production of Hans-Werner Henze's comic opera filmed at Berlin's Deutsche Oper. With the plot centering around how a whole town is deceived into taking a dressed monkey as a young lord, the work features performances from, among others, Edith Mathis, Donald Grobe and Barry McDaniel. Christoph von Dohnányi conducts.

Vera Meiners' life was sweet but unfortunately for her, it was not to last. Her husband, Jan, left her after she met a former lover in a harmless friendly meeting. Forced to resume her disrupted medical career, she worked in a Swiss clinic but, without the knowledge of the chief surgeon, Vera ordered a risky operation to be performed and was thereafter fired. Penniless, she then works in Spanish nightclubs in order to provide for herself and her child. After many years, she runs into her friend Frank again in one of these nightclubs...

After leaving his overbearing wife for another woman, a composer is suspected of her murder when she is found dead.

Achim and Vera are friends and live an uncomplicated and happy life .... that is, until they get into their first serious argument on how they should spend New Year's Eve. Vera wants to celebrate with friends, while Achim wants to go off to a lonely mountain hut. And so, he goes off alone into the mountains. In the hut, he meets the student Susanne, with whom he spends New Years' Eve; gets to know well; and falls in love with. Unfortunately, through misfortune, they lose sight of each other afterwards...