Hans-Dieter Schlegel

This story starts in 1980 in Paris as the memories of Andrei Borodin, a Soviet agent, take the action back to 1943 during the Teheran meetings of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. A high-ranking Nazi officer developed a plan to assassinate the three world leaders in order to undermine the Allied forces. He commissioned the German agent Max Richard to carry out his plan, but it failed miserably due to the quick action and thinking of Andrei. While in Teheran, Andrei met a French woman, Marie Louni, living in the city and they had a brief but intense affair. Nearly four decades later, the Nazi officer has been captured - but not for long. Freed by terrorists, the officer is hunting down the German agent who failed to carry out the planned assassinations. Max lives at Françoise, a young French woman, who hides him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was the author of Werther, the romantic novel that was transformed into a play during Goethe's lifetime and which initiated the whole German romantic movement. The book's story tells of young love and suicide. In this East German film, based on a book by Thomas Mann, Lotte (Lilli Palmer) was the woman who served as the model for the heroine in the novel Werther. She comes to Goethe's hometown for a visit, and her experiences there eerily re-create episodes from the book. Goethe comes across as a pompous old bore, and his friends as pandering sycophants, in this very proper communist party-sponsored, anti-heroic movie.

At the end of the 1950s, the production of optics in the German Democratic Republic has reached top quality and instigates interest in the West. When national demand rises strongly and at the same time the export to South America heavily decreases, the Volkspolizei - the GDR police force - starts to look into the case. Two seemingly unrelated cases are the starting point for the investigation by second lieutenant Schellenberg of the department for optics racketeering: An old woman who was arrested in the Berlin city railway for trying to smuggle a pair of binoculars to West Berlin, and a dead person in an area of allotments who was involved in obscure dealings with optical devices.

Following a training course, the 28-year-old Helga Baumann, a single mother of two children, meets up with her husband Fred again. They had separated a while ago because their ideas of marriage were completely disparate: The conservative Fred advocated the woman′s role of wife and mother, while Helga dreamt about an emancipated partnership between two employed persons. Now, her sister has brought them back together. At first sight, Fred seems to have changed and, once again, Helga cannot resist his advances. But when she meets with difficulties during a fair in Tashkent, Fred yet again proves to be a petty bourgeois by assuring her that they would get along perfectly without her working.

A doctor of social sciences - a specialist in failing marriages - becomes jealous. He imagines his skater wife in various situations, but always on skates.

The November Revolution of 1918 in Germany, famine and social upheaval evoke a response from the young Soviet government in Russia. To provide food assistance, trains with bread are being formed. One of them, on the personal instructions of V.I. Lenin is accompanied by the young revolutionary Tatyana . On the way, she meets a former German prisoner of war, Kurt . A romantic relationship arises between them. The train with bread, despite all the difficulties, was delivered. In a clash with a detachment of counter-revolutionary German troops, Tatyana was wounded. She returns to Moscow, and Kurt goes to Berlin to continue the revolutionary struggle.

Ede falls in love with Unku, a girl from a travelling circus. Love cannot run smoothly however because Unku is a Gypsy. Various adventures take place before love is finally allowed to run its natural course.

A morality tale from the time of the Saxon Kingdom. The von Siebenthal volunteer fire department has nothing to do. When their local pub is in a very dilapidated state, but the landlord has no money to renovate it, the fire department tries to help out by setting fire to it themselves, but it doesn't quite work. They look for a new object to set fire to, the supposedly empty prison. But there is only one prisoner, who is heroically rescued by Captain Kaden.