Wolfgang Luderer

The adventures of three friends from East Germany on the Black Sea.

Four directors - four styles - four episodes, all relating the events of a single night which has entered the history books: August 12-13, 1961. There are thousands of complex narratives connected with the frontier drawn through the middle of Berlin, and each episode relates the story of a difficult decision made on that night...

GDR tourism expert Obermüller wants to instruct his deputy Hurtig in the management of the newly opened Schneemannbaude (ski lodge). However, he makes an embarrassing mistake beforehand. As a result, the entire staff, from the cook to the chambermaid, take a few days off over the turn of the year, while the first guests are already arriving. They have to roll up their sleeves and lend a hand, whether making the beds, working at reception or in the boiler room. Despite the improvisational skills of the Obermüller/Hurtig team, there are a few minor compromises when it comes to service...

The starting point of the story is a scandalous affair that took place in West Germany at the end of the 1950s. It began with the unexpected death of a member of the Bundestag who was known to the public as a well-paid lawyer and influential man in politics. What was not known, however, was that he mysteriously died of poisoning in a foreign hospital for the poor. It was concealed that the deceased, as a contact person for a Swiss arms company, represented a West German arms contract worth 2.5 billion marks. The Military Counterintelligence Service tried everything to conceal the explosive events...

In 1929 Berlin, the progressive editor-in-chief Bornstein is on trial for libel. An article in his magazine attempted to uncover the role that Reichsanwalt Jörns had played ten years earlier in the "clarification" of the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The article explained that the then court martial judge knowingly covered up for the murderers and delayed the trial. At the trial, the testimony of witnesses succeeded in proving the truth of the publication and exposing those behind the murders as those who were preparing fascism.

In 1944, SS-Obersturmbannführer Becher arrives in Budapest in order to obtain material for the Waffen-SS. At the same time, he starts to gather private property by offering an insidious choice to the corporation′s Jewish majority shareholder, Dr. Chorin: Either Chorin assigns the company to Becker "on his own free will" – thereby obtaining the permission to travel abroad - or he his family will end up in an extermination camp.

After participating in more than 100,000 euthanasia crimes during the Nazi era, the former SS psychiatrist and physician Dr. Werner Heyde leads an unmolested life in West Germany after the war under a false name ("Fritz Sawade"). With the help of confidants, he manages to get a job as a medical expert. His true identity remains in the dark for many years. His wife has him declared dead and draws the pension of a psychology professor's widow. After remaining unidentified for ten years, Dr. Heyde is unmasked and arrested one day and found dead in his cell shortly before the start of the trial. The film plot is based on the authentic case of Dr. Werner Heyde.

Based on a true story from 1936: Klara Baumann, a working-class woman, communist and mother, flees her German homeland for neighboring Czechoslovakia. When a party courier is arrested in Berlin, Klara agrees to return to Germany with illegal material. On behalf of the central courier service, she returned to Germany illegally many times, risking her life, in constant fear of being caught. When the illegal party cell in a large Berlin factory is arrested, Klara distributes the latest issue of the Red Signal on her own. She wants to prove to the Gestapo that she has imprisoned the wrong people. Authentic story of a communist and mother who flees her German homeland for neighboring Czechoslovakia in 1936.