Hans Kremer

East-Berlin, 1961, shortly after the erection of the Wall. Konrad, Sophie and three of their friends plan a daring escape to Western Germany. The attempt is successful, except for Konrad, who remains behind. From then on, and for the next 28 years, Konrad and Sophie will attempt to meet again, in spite of the Iron Curtain. Konrad, who has become a reputed Astrophysicist, tries to take advantage of scientific congresses outside Eastern Germany to arrange encounters with Sophie. But in a country where the political police, the Stasi, monitors the moves of all suspicious people (such as Konrad's sister Barbara and her husband Harald), preserving one's privacy, ideals and self-respect becomes an exhausting fight, even as the Eastern block begins its long process of disintegration.

When Bertha dies, her granddaughter Iris inherits her house and finds herself back in the home where she and her cousin used to play dressing-up in the summer holidays. While she wanders from room to room, she gropes her way through memories and things she had forgotten: What did her grandfather really do before he went to war? Which men were Bertha’s daughters in love with? Who ate his apple with the seeds?

When Ruth's husband dies in New York, in 2000, she imposes strict Jewish mourning, which puzzles her children. A stranger comes to the house - Ruth's cousin - with a picture of Ruth, age 8, in Berlin, with a woman the cousin says helped Ruth escape. Hannah, Ruth's daughter engaged to a gentile, goes to Berlin to find the woman, Lena Fisher, now 90. Posing as a journalist investigating intermarriage, Hannah interviews Lena who tells the story of a week in 1943 when the Jewish husbands of Aryan women were detained in a building on Rosenstrasse. The women gather daily for word of their husbands. The film goes back and forth to tell Ruth and Lena's story. How will it affect Hannah?

After earlier hostility, Halfried Seelig is now widely recognized for what she does. Her daughter Marion is trying to put down roots again in her former home after separating from her husband Thomas. It is not made easy for her, especially not by her adolescent daughter Laura.

Mo lost her heart to Tom, but left him nine years ago for no apparent reason. Now she lives together with son Benjamin in Hamburg. Mo has another man, Tom has been living with another woman for some time. When Mo learns that she is terminally ill, she returns to her great love, Tom. Both feel instinctively that they still love each other. But Mo reveals nothing of her illness and their child.

In Munich, the Armenian Areg dreams of studying cinema with his German girlfriend Lilly. Until her widowed mother fell seriously ill with diabetes. Areg and her little brother Garnik have to take care of her.

The Japanese student Aki Onodera travels in her family’s tracks from Tokyo to Germany. In idyllic East Allgaeu she meets the Webers, who take her in as their guest. But soon, the situation of the family becomes turbulent by her appearance…

In Thomas Ostermeier's stage version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film, Maria marries German soldier Hermann Braun during World War II. The couple spend over a decade apart due to forces largely beyond Maria's control. To survive in postwar Germany, she becomes a sex worker, a wealthy industrialist's mistress, and eventually a ruthless capitalist during the German economic miracle, while still asserting her loyalty to Hermann.