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.
In the Jim-Crow South, Val Xavier is a bass-playing drifter who retains a wild, compassionate spirit amid neon-lit decay. Nicknamed “Snake Skin” for his animal-hide jacket, Val seeks to shed the emptiness of wealthy nightclubs and, after turning thirty, yearns for a modest, purposeful life...
Jürgen Fohrmann works as a hauer underground. In the course of the coal crisis, his mine closes - he loses the work. In this mood, his wife's prosperity thinking gets on his nerves - his marriage threatens to break. The dismissed coal buddy applys, first becomes an auxiliary worker, but then...
Inge Karsten receives an unexpected visit from her former student friend Margit from the West. She is even more surprised to hear that she is married to her stepbrother Herbert, who was long thought to be missing and whom she had almost forgotten. He last lived in Canada. This presents Inge's...
In 1928 Berlin, 19-year-old stenotypist Erna Halbe lands a prized typing job at Orga Privat. Thrust into the soul-killing monotony of a sprawling corporate office, she rallies her fellow typists to challenge unjust working conditions. Amid economic tremors foreshadowing the 1929 crash, Erna fights...
Count Harro von Treuenfels is suspected of poisoning his wife. Griseldis von Ronach, his daughter's governess, falls in love with the count and sets out to find the real culprit.
