Brothers Franz and Erich Sass grew up poor. Together with his brother Franz, Erich specializes in cracking safes. Erich spends the money with his hands full. In the meantime, the police have also become aware of the brothers. Pursued by Detective Fabich, they get deeper and deeper into criminal circles. A man called Adolf demands that the Sass brothers work for him. He blackmails them and has their father beaten to death. The brothers then agree to work together. However, Adolf plans to have them killed after the coup. The two brothers manage to escape; they are also able to flee from the police, who catch them while they are still breaking into the bank.
Ulrich Mühe plays a German businessman who was born completely without scruples. This makes him an eminently suitable candidate for success in the chaotic years after World War I. The shameless man's story is contrasted with that of his polar opposite, a Jewish anarchist.
Schtonk! is a farce of the actual events of 1983, when Germany's Stern magazine published, with great fanfare, 60 volumes of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler – which two weeks later turned out to be entirely fake. Fritz Knobel (based on real-life forger Konrad Kujau) supports himself by faking and selling Nazi memorabilia. When Knobel writes and sells a volume of Hitler's (nonexistent) diaries, he thinks it's just another job. When sleazy journalist Hermann Willié learns of the diaries, however, he quickly realizes their potential value... and Knobel is quickly in over his head. As the pressure builds and Knobel is forced to deliver more and more volumes of the fake diaries, he finds himself acting increasingly like the man whose life he is rewriting. The film is a romping and hilarious satire, poking fun not only at the events and characters involved in the hoax (who are only thinly disguised in the film), but at the discomfort Germany has with its difficult past.
A poignant film essay about 'superfluous people' facing up to a moment of crisis in their lives.
A Jewish professor returning from U.S. exile watches his Berlin university descend into militant ideological coercion during the 1968 reform struggles and ultimately decides to leave Germany again.
A detective disillusioned with life takes a young male prostitute under his wing and is able to give his own existence meaning again.
When Michael Rosenzweig, a working-class German Jew, is charged with the murder of a neo-Nazi leader, he and his family find themselves fighting for justice in the face of a brick wall of prejudice.
The satirical film is about the liquidation of a sewing machine combine by the Treuhandanstalt (THA) in the town of Altenburg in Thuringia. The company is ailing. The (corrupt) officer in charge at the THA wants to close the company and give the property to the West German entrepreneur Theo Krautinger for just one Deutschmark. Plant manager Blacher and his accountant Bienlein thwart this plan by presenting a Korean investor. This investor is in fact the Vietnamese temporary worker Hua ... The film was partly shot on the premises of the THA.
Her only foray into science fiction—about the havoc wrought on society by a television that satisfies every human craving—The Last Days of Gomorrah was a favorite of Sanders-Brahms, who brought feminist politics to the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s. It is a forceful piece of capitalist realism, critiquing working-class alienation and commodity culture.
Lord Claverton, an eminent former cabinet minister and banker, is helped to confront his past by the love of his daughter, his Antigone.
Famous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele — the 'Death Angel of Auschwitz', who killed more than 300.000 people — emerges from his hideout in Argentina to Germany as a 87-year-old man, and must stand for his crimes in court. The young solicitor Peter Rohm is assigned to defend him, but Rohm himself — an expert on Mengele and his crimes — feels unable to do so. When he decides to take on the case, he endangers not only his marriage but also his and his wife's lives.
Dutch police inspector Piet Van der Valk finds himself repeatedly crossing paths wiht the beautiful yet troubled Lucienne Englebert, the daughter of a famous conductor recently killed in a car accident. Whern the maverick inspector investigates the seemingly senseless killing of a man in Amsertdam, will Lucienne turn up again?