Alice Treff

A diligent office worker and a cheeky sales representative are tasked by their boss with reserving a first-class hotel room with a bathroom for a visiting Hamburg exporter and his wife. A misunderstanding leads to non-stop confusion, because the office worker is spending his first wedding anniversary with his wife in the rented hotel room.

Lothar von Pütz and Roswitha von Krakow fall in love and only then discover that their fathers are bitter enemies. When Lothar's father dies, a close friend of his father's, Baron Maximilian von Hanckel, takes the boy under his wing and tries to make peace between the families. He visits Roswitha's father, who begins to hope that he can marry his daughter to the older, but wealthy, baron, who is still a bachelor. When an argument breaks out between Lothar and Roswitha, she agrees to marry Maximilian. It is only at the pre-wedding party that Roswitha and Lothar have a real conversation. Maximilian overhears everything, releases Roswitha from her vows, and brings the two young people together.

After World War II, a lot of people, who lived in the eastern parts of the Third Reich had to be relocated. One of them is Hugo Starosta (Martin Held) with his family. They live in a fortress. Hugo is unemployed, his children don't seem to like school, but somehow they managa to get through.

Miss Annemarie Tessmer is a clerk in the house of the manufacturer Herman Schilling and she is indispensable. She is exploited by all the family members and her own life is completely in the background. Herman Schilling wants his daughter Thea merry with the representative for foreign affairs Dr. Richard Rauch. However, after a number of dramatic complications, Richard chooses for the good, selfless and hardworking Annemarie.

A German soldier home on leave falls in love with a girl, then returns to World War II.

A mature, rich and bored woman called Elisabeth is taking a ride with the “Rheingold”, a first-class high-speed train of the seventies along the river Rhine. In the train she is meeting her old school mate and lover who is working as a waiter and falls in love with him again. Her husband, a busy politician, realizes what’s going on and tries to catch the train to face his wife and her lover in a fatal showdown.

Thomas Mann's witty and intimate story of a irresistible scoundrel.