Siegfried Lenz

The end of a summer, a sleepy fishing port on the Baltic Sea and the beginning of a great feeling that must not be: Shortly before the start of the new school year, the 18-year-old Christian falls in love with his new English teacher Stella Petersen. In a moment of unexpected lightness and freedom, in the dunes and seascape far away from the small town, Stella and Christian discover a shared longing and an attraction to each other, the intensity of which both overwhelmed. But soon after class has begun again, the secret relationship between the young teacher and her pupil threatens the scandal ...

In a small North German village a drama played out during and shortly after the Second World War about duty versus individual conscience and morality.

A trio of robbers, two brothers and their twisted genius leader, invade a lightship, but don't reckon on the crew fighting back.

A corpse is washed up on the beach of the North Sea. The deceased is Alexander, husband of the beautiful Bettina. They have been coming to the island for a long time and possess a cottage there. At first no one doubts that Alexander died of an accident, but the young policewoman Maike, who has known the family since her childhood, thinks that Alexander should have been familiar with the mudflat. Did he kill himself?

The naive 18 year old Dobrila leaves her little Serbian village to travel to Hamburg, Germany, where her boyfriend lives. The trip is not easy. Finally in Hamburg she has to realize her boyfriend is not very interested in a relationship. She doesn't tell him she's pregnant and starts on her way home to Serbia, which turns out to be even more exhausting.

61-year-old Paul Hinrichs impersonates being 10 year younger in order to get a job as diver once again.

The German lightship (permanently anchored floating 'lighthouse') Borkum Riff is about to be decommissioned. For his last tour of duty, Captain Johann Freytag brings along his near-adult, estranged son Fred. The ship picks up three men stranded in a broken-down boat--who are armed. The captain tries to avoid trouble, but the crew, his son, and the trio of violent robbers on the run keep rejecting his nonviolent advice, which leads to repeated bloodshed.

Anne Hoppe, who works as a meteorologist at the Maritime Weather Office in Hamburg, has been mourning her husband Harry for a year. This died on New Year's morning when a container ship sank. However, his body was not found. At a memorial service, Anne thinks she recognizes her husband, who has been declared dead, among the guests...

Arne comes into the family of an old friend of his father as a foster child. He hopes to find closeness and security with Harald, his wife Elsa and their children Hans, Wiebke and Lars. But he finds it difficult to integrate - his trust in the community has been shaken by his great misfortune. However, he feels attracted to Wiebke, even though she keeps distancing herself from him. After Arne's clumsiness causes the sailing boat that the young people had restored together to be wrecked during the launch and he is supposedly a traitor after a joint theft, a rift occurs with Wiebke and her brothers. Harald is also deeply disappointed in his foster son.

Uli and Nora share an intimate, late love. But Uli always avoids the decision to stand on the common relationship. One morning Uli suffers a stroke during a tour of the harbor on the Elbe. He fights his way through the city to the reading room of the library where Nora works. At the last minute, an ambulance takes Uli to the hospital. In this situation, Nora is overwhelmed. When, on the initiative of her friend Eva, she fetches a few things for Uli from his apartment, a cell phone rings. At the other end there is an unknown female voice that sounds strangely familiar ...

Jan Hinrichs is an experienced ship and salvage inspector. After the bankruptcy of his last employer, however, he is not above working as a simple diver. The widower has two children to support and soon a third eater is on board, as his daughter Lena is pregnant. The only problem is that Hinrichs is 55 and, in the eyes of the shipowners, too old for this job that requires bones and fitness. And so he pretends to be 10 years younger at a job interview. He falsifies his diving book and gets himself a fake passport. The world wants to be deceived. Now things are suddenly working out: Hinrichs does his job, he does it well and his boss is happy with him - for the time being.

In the last days of WW2, the German minesweeper MX12 is on its way into the enemy’s zone to pick up wounded soldiers. When a radio message proclaims the end of war, the crew demands to break off the risky mission. Only the captain wants to continue.

Set against the backdrop of post-war Germany, the screen adaptation of Siegfried Lenz’s short story released in 1949 shows a snapshot in time of Mr. Schwamm, an indulgent husband and caring father, who wants so save his depressed son. During the pivotal night of this mission, he has an odd encounter: Paired up by destiny, he confides his troubles to a bitter and insensitive stranger, who in the very last minute manages to turn the story into a touching parable for kindness and humanity.

Summer 1944. Walter Proska is about to return to the Eastern Front when his train is blown up by partisans. Together with a scattered bunch of German soldiers, cut off from the front, he awaits certain death while the commands of his superior Willi Stehauf are becoming more and more senseless and inhuman.

Siggi Jepsen, an inmate at the juvenile detention center, is assigned to write an essay in the 1950s. Topic: the joys of duty. He immediately thinks of his own father. As a police sergeant, his father took his official duties more than seriously during the Nazi regime. Siggi becomes increasingly pensive. He writes about his father, who even sacrifices his friendship with an old friend for the sake of his sense of duty. Siggi had protected this friend as a child, and now has to serve time for it…