Gert Voss

A young prosecutor in postwar West Germany investigates a massive conspiracy to cover up the Nazi pasts of prominent public figures.

This is the sprawling saga of Honoré de Balzac, a man who created a great literary oeuvre from the dramas and adventures of his own life - a life that he shaped into one spectacular and unforgettable blaze of passion. At the heart of the story are the women in Balzac's life. Although gruff, unsophisticated, and far from handsome, Balzac exerts an irresistible fascination on women.

Thomas and Hanna, a deliriously happy couple in their late 30s, buy an old house in the country with plans to fix it up over the summer. Hanna is looking forward to their time together – so when Thomas invites his older brother, Friedrich, who is deeply depressed over the failure of both his business and his marriage, to join them, she is disappointed by the intrusion. Easygoing, charming, and talkative, Thomas seeks to counterbalance the cloudier mood with an impetuous frenzy of activity, but Hanna retreats into sullenness and retaliates by bringing in her nubile young godchild Augustine until things smooth themselves out. Augustine’s youthful sexiness has anything but a soothing impact on Thomas, however, whose adolescent impulses linger just below the surface.

If you climb, you risk falling. For master builder Solness, this is doubly true. He had started out as a clerk in an architect's office, but soon got his own commissions and pushed his boss more and more to the side. Marrying a wealthy woman and her stately possessions came in handy for him. When the house he inherited fell victim to a fire, he subdivided the site and placed single-family homes on it. His boss became his employee, as did his son, and finally he made his fiancee his accountant. She adores him, which he only uses to keep the family dependent. Solness is considered a happy person. But he is driven by fear and feelings of guilt.

Georg, who is happy with his job as a scientist, with his loving wife and with his three children, hears one day that an accident has happened in a chemical plant nearby. All of a sudden, he finds himself face to face with one of the victims. The man, whose face has been eaten away by the sour gas that escaped from the plant, is staring at him in despair. Does Georg really see the man or is this a mere hallucination? Is he becoming insane or is he more alert to the dangers of the world than the common man?

The diabolically brilliant doctor Dr. Knock from Karlsruhe takes over a rural doctor's practice in Bavaria. To achieve his goal of a lucrative sanatorium, he must overcome empty waiting rooms, empty coffers and gullible citizens. And so Dr. Knock intrigues ruthlessly. He succeeds in acquiring power, prestige and the desired property. But what is the deal with the blue letters with no sender that flutter into the practice?

A social satire in which a chauffeur accidentally becomes the editor of an online newspaper.

An aging King invites disaster when he abdicates to his corrupt, toadying daughters and rejects his one loving, but honest one.