George Gruntz

On a summer morning, the opening of the trial in the Zurich District Court is scheduled for 8 a.m. The case of Marlene Faber and Nick Merk's divorce is being heard on the grounds of "mental cruelty." The couple is waiting outside the courtroom for their divorce and is reliving their marriage: from the honeymoon to the first quarrels and the end.

In the bourgeois circles of Europe after the Great War, can anything save the modern man? Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, has all his life feared his dual nature of being human and being a beast. He's decided to die on his 50th birthday, which is soon. He's rescued from his solipsism by the mysterious Hermine, who takes him dancing, introduces him to jazz and to the beautiful and whimsical Maria, and guides him into the hallucinations of the Magic Theater, which seem to take him into Hell. Can humour, sin, and derision lead to salvation?

Richard Mertens, a successful magazine editor with a cold, empty marriage to Lucy, seeks excitement through an affair with younger colleague Eva. Yet his need for status traps him in superficiality, undermining genuine connection. A legal battle with old friend Ferrow, won through perjury, reveals Mertens’s moral emptiness, shattering his relationship with Eva. Alone, he finds solace only in listening to bartender Brigitte.

Tells of the tribulations of a middle-aged official of the Austro-Hungarian Bureau of Weights and Measures in fighting the local shopkeepers and traders whose weights are frequently light.

What to do if you are stuck as a police officer in a boring small town, no decent crimes happen and you should actually make the big career at the instigation of your wife? In this lamentable situation is Heinrich Karpf. An unfine plan is supposed to bring about the change: where there is no spectacular case, one must be faked...

A well-off couple adopt a 16-year-old boy from an orphanage in West Berlin, but their attempts to help him assimilate into his new surroundings fail. The repressive tolerance of the well-educated adoptive parents is just too much for the mischievous young boy.