In the 1770s, Swiss farmer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi established a school for poor orphaned children in the Aargau. Up to total exhaustion he sacrificed himself for his pedagogical theories. Five years later, the project of the idealistic educator failed after bloody attacks of the French. In...
Berlin in the 1930s - Adolf Hitler comes to power, communists and social democrats are persecuted, books are burned and Jewish citizens are ostracized. The outwardly shiny façade of Berlin, the capital of the Reich, reveals nothing of the unequal struggle of young people against the increasing...
After a long time, a circus is back in the area of Tidal Basin and already the strange phantom has reappeared: the white clown! He robbed banks and stores without a system and disappeared without a trace. Lane and Higgins, together with the worn-out journalist Shapiro, hunt for the mysterious...
Second-hand car sales man Willenbrock has everything that he could ever wish for. He is married, has two lovers, a cottage in the German city Grünen, and a BMW. Yet one day while at his cottage he gets mugged and his life is drastically changed. Little by little the world he once felt safe in...
1945. Peace still bears the traces of war everywhere. There meet the animated girl Xenia and the former boxer Henry. Being together gives them a sense of opportunity. She wants to break away from the semi-world milieu, he try a comeback in the boxing ring.
"Everything in life happens for a reason." After the death of his pregnant wife, Schimon clings to this sentence. When he meets Milena just two weeks later and falls head over heels in love with her, he thinks he's found the reason.
Klara Sonntag, probation officer, believes in the good in people. Everybody deserves a second chance. This is how she tackles her work. The judge Thomas Aschenbach, with whom she is secretly together, is at her side.
In the 22nd Century, antiquities command huge prices. A woman uses a time machine to travel back the the 19th Century in order to buy paintings from Vincent Van Gogh before he was famous. Will she be wealthy upon her return?
In 1989, teacher Wendler and his wife leave the GDR to join his Bavarian uncle. In the West, the line-loyal educator with a whitewashed CV is immediately accepted back into the teaching profession. He advances to become a model Bavarian. Until one day a pupil from bygone GDR days turns up...
33-year-old Jackie has a real problem: Frederik Forster, the son of a rich and powerful Munich publishing family, has proposed to her - much to the displeasure of his mother Marianne - and Jackie has happily agreed. Now she just has to persuade her husband Tom to finally sign the divorce papers.
Paul Schulte takes a spa stay on the Baltic Sea to have his heart condition treated. His wife Barbara accompanies him and finds interest in the valuable art objects in a nearby church. Together with her accomplice and lover Klaus Grunow, she plans to break into the church. But Paul Schulte sees...
The Oppen family has lived in Berlin, Griesener Straße, for generations. The first names of the family members are also repeated, so the grandson Jan has the same first name as his grandfather. The Oppens' husbands have maintained a tradition up to now: they were or are all carpenters. But the...
Three kilos of marijuana! The fact that drug smuggler Eda got away with a suspended sentence is due to her seven-year-old son Robert. Probation officer Klara Sunday, who knows a home childhood from her own experience, worries about him at least as much as she does about his tough-looking mother.
1978. In a desperate act of love, a plane is hijacked in East Germany and forced to land in the American Sector of West Berlin, triggering a Cold War crisis and forcing 60 hapless passengers to decide in minutes whether to give up everything and stay in the West...
Fourteen-year-old Stefan Kolbe, along with his mother and sister, moves from an idyllic small town to the developing area of Berlin-Marzahn, where his father works as a construction worker. Stefan must find his way in a completely new environment and surrounded by strange people. Stefan gets to...
Horst Krause picks up a girl on the wintry country road and brings her back to the "Kinderhaus Sonnenschein" in the neighboring village. This sets a series of events in motion that brings a few guests, big and small, to the country inn in Schönhorst during the Advent season.