Gerhard Lamprecht

An adventurer, Peter Diercksen, travels to South America to guide an expedition into the jungle. However, when the ship is quarantined he believes he has a serious disease. He does not accompany the trip, which runs into major problems.

Gerhard Lamprecht sketches a cross-section of Germany's new post-war society, with its winners, social climbers, and losers, represented by the social microcosm of an apartment building. The gossip-mad Frau Mierig from the rear building gives the newly-arrived Frau Kaminski, the janitor's wife, a lively initiation into the tenants and their peculiarities.

When a suspicious man bribes Emil with chocolate in return for a bundle of cash, the young lad thinks of a plan to catch him.

Drama in a small German water town where various characters clash against a backdrop of money, gambling and love.

In 19th-century France, doctor's wife Emma Bovary seeks to escape her dull provincial life through various extramarital affairs and extravagant spending, leading to tragic consequences.

It was not just the children who were treated badly by the wealthy Weimar republic. Robert Kramer is released from prison but struggles to adjust to civilian life. His father disowns him, his wife has left him for another man. There is no work. He eventually arrives in a shelter for the homeless, and seeks salvation through Emma, a prostitute.

After WWII, Berlin lies in ruins. For Gustav, Willi and their friends the rubble provides an adventurous, dangerous playground. Especially for Gustav, it helps pass the time, as he longs for his father's return from a POW camp. One day a stranger arrives, looking helpless and hopeless.

Silent epic on the final years of Frederick II.

In 1812, during the French period, large parts of Germany are occupied by the troops of Napoleon. Several paramilitary Freikorps units battle the French forces, among them the Black Brunswickers led by the 'Black Duke' Frederick William of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. After the War of the Fifth Coalition, the Black Hussars are pursued by Napoleon throughout the country, but frequently take refuge with the noble-minded German people.

Wolf Noltenius is a real globetrotter. Early on, this talented young man travelled far and wide, where he earned fame as a construction planner. He moved to Brazil; but one day, homesickness got the best of him. He spontaneously travelled back to his hometown to visit his brother Werner and his family. Wolf and Werner, who both went into the same profession, couldn't be any more different: the one is worldly and an experienced man-about-town; the other a small bourgeois.

After World War II, Jürgen Godeysen ends up in a hospital, wounded and traumatized. There, the young Nicoline reads to him from the diaries of his father, Michael. The entries chronicle his life and loves, from the moment he first encountered his first love as a young ensign in Berlin at the turn of the century, to the moment he returned from World War I broken and with no will to live.

A young woman working as a secretary for a Berlin car business tries to impress a rich Australian visitor by pretending she is a foreign countess.

A gambling-drama based on Dostoevsky’s works: The retired General Kirileff is addicted to gambling and also has a costly affair. He takes out a loan from the greedy imposter Vincent, for which he is to pay an exorbitant interest rate. Vincent, for his part, wants to get closer to Kirileff’s daughter Nina, who is to inherit her grandmother’s fortune one day. Nina tries to help her father and goes to the gambling tables, only to lose a lot of money. She asks Alexej, her father’s secretary, to play for her. Alexej is in love with Nina and would do anything for her. He plays; at first loses; then asks Nina to get Vincent out of there. Once that happens, he wins a large amount of money, becomes overbearing and treats Nina like a prostitute.

An Italian engineer who had made a strategically important invention to ward off enemy aircraft is killed in a robbery. As the plans have presumably fallen into the hands of spies, secret service captain Bergall is given the task of recovering the papers. Bergall initially adopts a false name and appears as Mr. Gran, whom nobody knows. Under this name, he rents a room in the Hotel Danieli in Venice and makes the acquaintance of the shipowner's daughter Viola Dolleen. With her help, he is able to eliminate Captain Gordon, who is also interested in the plans. When Gran learns that the plans are now in the possession of the art dealer Tschernikoff, who wants to sell them to Gordon, he immediately travels to Rome, visits the art dealer Titian and pretends to be Gordon. In the art dealer's remote villa, events come thick and fast...

If watching a fellow facing indifference/rejection in the slums of Berlin didn't convey enough pathos, Gerhard Lamprecht gathered much of the same crew from Die Verrufenen and turned his attention to the city's population of unwanted children for the heart-tugging Die Unehelichen, released the following year. The trio of foster children at the center of Die Verrufenen are survivors who use their own resourcefulness to get by when the kids' guardians and the system itself let them down.

Else Riedel (Lissy Arna), locked out by her authoritarian father, seeks refuge with her boyfriend Hans. Complications threaten when Hans's roommate Max falls in love with her, but the situation is resolved: the three remain friends, and decide to form a music hall act. They want to ascend, but how? A way out beckons when a theatrical agent named Nevin enters Else’s life. He is played by Hubert von Meyerinck as a slick and oily villain, who oozes refinement; his experience behind bars is waved away with a silk scarf. He is cunning to the point of perfidiousness, but is not completely unsympathetic. He also embodies a new type - the scrounger.

An aging prostitute develops a motherly affection for a kind young man, but her pimp does not approve.

During a journey of the "Ceder", the Captain, von Moltmann, disappears. It looks like an accident, but it could also have been murder. Attorney Dr. Burger and superintendent Störensen discover quickly that two of the crewmen hated the Captain: Chief officer Rohlfs suspects an affair between his fianceé Gerda and von Moltmann. Chief engineer Sparkuhl thinks the Captain has seduced his niece, who later committed suicide. The court decides that the Captain has gone overboard without anyone else's "help", but the rumors don't come to an end.

In the second part of the drama, the wounded Jürgen hears about the happy years his father Michael spent with his wife Bim at the "Fohlenhof." He learns how the war took everything from him and how Michael was nearly broken by the death of his beloved Bim, who died while giving birth to Jürgen. It was only through his favorite horse that he began to believe in life again and fight for his son.

Four-generation story-saga dealing with the decline of a middle-class Lübeck family. The first adaptation of a Thomas Mann book was also Gerhard Lamprecht’s first major film.