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Since time immemorial, we have used images to form a picture of the world. But never before has there been as much filming and photography as there is currently. But how do people deal with it when the world and its image merge? The filmmakers Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer show how quickly and profoundly the way we deal with images is changing. Will we eventually move into a world in which reality and image can no longer be distinguished from each other?

The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.

October 2018 was the four-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The documentary traces the story of how it was finally brought to an end with the peace of Munster and Osnabruck – the first peace in European history to be concluded at the negotiating table and not fought on the battlefield.

The composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is still a shining light today. But behind his radiant aura lies a dark shadow. His life was full of contradictions. During the "Third Reich", he was president of the Reich Chamber of Music and at the same time protector of the Jewish part of his family. Who was this Richard Strauss?

300 years before globalized communication and long before Facebook and Instagram, Leibniz had "friends" all over the world - more than 1,300 mail partners. For the cultural scientist Joseph Vogl from the Humboldt University in Berlin, Leibniz's way of working was something of an "information processing machine". Most of his estate is in Hanover, where Leibniz worked as a librarian and consultant at the Duke's court for 40 years. Leibniz has written so much in his life that so far only a part of the total of 200,000 pages has been recorded and published. It is expected that everything will be edited in 2055. Who was this Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who said of himself: "Whoever knows me only from my published writings does not know me"? The film searches for Leibniz as a person. The documentary portrays the genius Leibniz in his time and always brings him back to our present. Different people have their say, and their work would not be possible without Leibniz.

In 1979, under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, revolution broke out in Iran and overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This event marks the end of a two and a half thousand year old monarchy. This documentary retraces the lives of these two enemies who clashed for more than thirty years, from the Shah's rise to power in the 1940s until his fall.