Hans Flössel

In this East German teen musical, a group of girls are planning to take their summer vacation together on the Baltic coast. When a loud and obnoxious group of boys intrudes on their holiday, the girls are horrified to learn that the boys have the same vacations plans as them. The two groups quarrel with each other and compete over a number of things, but gradually an attraction starts to form.

Film by Thiel and Brandt.

Was it an act of sabotage or willful negligence? The non-party engineer Heinz Solter is suddenly arrested and accused of approving a defective pipeline that caused a half million loss to his company. At first, the case seems clear-cut for the state prosecutor, but when he probes deeper, he discovers that Solter had acted against his better judgment due to the pressure from his career-driven and authoritarian boss.

Carolin lives in the East and works in a West Berlin bar. After the building of the wall she tries to persuade Georg, a soldier of the border regiment, to let her cross over. He falls in love with her and defends her against a West German pimp with a punch to the jaw.

A Saturday evening dance in the village pub is interrupted when the barn of local farmer Paul Gäbler catches on fire. The farmer himself is soon found – hanged. Sawmill owner Züllich claims that Gäbler committed suicide because he was forced to join an agricultural production cooperative, but others are convinced Gäbler was murdered. Officers Schneider and Anders must navigate their way through a complex maze of personal and political motivations in order to reconstruct the crime.

Professor Hans Mamlock is the distinguished chief of surgery in a university hospital. The year is 1933, and although the Professor is Jewish, he remains unconcerned with politics and the growing Nazi threat. Mamlock identifies strongly as a German, and he believes his culture to be simply incapable of the common barbarism associated with the Nazi party. Accordingly, he shows little understanding for people with strong or unpopular political views, such as Walter, a patient, and Rolf, his own son. Indeed, when Rolf joins the communists in resisting the Nazis, Mamlock throws him out of his house. As the persecution of Jews intensifies during the 1930s, Mamlock's own daughter is targeted for anti-Semitic attacks at her school...

This film continues the story of radio operator Ludwig Bartuschek from “The Sailor’s Song”. Near the end of the Weimar Republic, Bartuschek (Erwin Geschonneck) is working as a mechanic in the Sperber airplane plant. Director Dehringer offers him the opportunity to train as an airplane constructor if he is willing to give up his communist beliefs under oath. Bartuschek will not allow himself to be bought and instead joins the underground resistance movement.

East German adaptation of Grimm‘s fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin“.

Film by Frank Vogel.

Railway employee Fritz Marr is not regarded well by his superiors. It is the year 1920, and trains regularly pass the railway hub of Erfurt to the East to secretly transport weapons for the fight against the young Soviet Union. Marr knows about this and wants to mobilise other workers to stop these illegal deliveries. To muzzle him, Marr is relocated to a remote rail work construction site.

Two boys from West Berlin, Klaus and Max, live in poverty. They dream of a career in boxing and save every penny in order to buy boxing gloves for training. Nevertheless, they cannot seem to save enough and so they let themselves be hired by the bartender Klott for a twisted scheme. However, Klaus overhears one of Klott's conversations and learns that Klott intends for the boys to steal horses from the East Berlin Barlay Circus, where Klaus recently made some good friends. Indignant, he sets out to stop the robbery—and an adventurous action story results.

This film is the first of a two-part historical and biographical portrait of the communist politician and anti-fascist Ernst Thälmann. In early November 1918, Ernst Thälmann is an unwilling soldier serving on the western front. As the revolutionary movement at home is threatened by the betrayal of the Social Democrats and fissures in the working class, Thälmann calls on his fellow soldiers to put down their weapons and unite with the workers in the communist struggle at home. Thälmann’s qualms about which side he is fighting on continue, but when the local police attempt to prevent a shipment of provisions and supplies from reaching the people in Petrograd, he intervenes and the ship is unloaded. With this moment of clarity, Thälmann continues to follow his political convictions and joins the workers at the Hamburg uprising in October 1923.