Nikolas Lansky

Prinzenbad gives us a microcosm of a society dominated by male power plays, wheeling and dealing, corruption, love, and eroticism.

The year is 1997, and World Peace seems to have come, with most classic weapons of mass destruction having been abandoned. However, orbiting the Earth there is the European/American space station FLORIDA ARKLAB, capable of controlling the weather at any location on the planet underneath. A civil project by nature, it might be abused as an offensive weapon, since it could deliver devastation to any potential adversary simply by creating natural disasters such as storms and floods. No wonder the space station soon becomes the central point in rising political tensions between East and West, next stop World War 3 (as indicated by the tagline "The end of our future has already begun"). We follow the main protagonist Billy Hayes, an astronaut aboard the station, as he wades through a plot of secrecy and sabotage trying to tell friend from foe in the process.

In the 1770s, Swiss farmer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi established a school for poor orphaned children in the Aargau. Up to total exhaustion he sacrificed himself for his pedagogical theories. Five years later, the project of the idealistic educator failed after bloody attacks of the French. In retrospect, the disappointed Pestalozzi experiences the last few months with "his" children.

The Time Machine is purchased from an antiques store by a physician from Berlin. Much of the script plays out in one room in the Berlin villa of Dr. Erasmus Beilowski. He and his well-educated friends have an intelligent discussion about the world and the future, with a view to the Time Machine. What to use it for?

Lady Osborne's gardener becomes the victim of a burglar when he catches him in the Lady's house. Soon more mysterious murders occur and Inspectors Higgins and Lane suspect a connection between the victims and the Lady's long-dead husband.

The young Munich sensational reporter Raoul Miller has attacked a lot of people in his cocaine report, who now take terrible revenge: they kill his girlfriend Raphaela and his parents. The drug mafia also ensures that Raoul loses his good reputation and becomes an outsider. But Raoul does not give up...

Philipp Gabert and his best friend, Dr. Nicolas Amberg, are hiking in the mountains. Suddenly, Philipp suffers a strange attack of weakness and loses consciousness. Nicolas is only just able to prevent his fall. But the friendship between the two men is burdened by a problem: Nicolas is secretly in love with Philipp's wife Julia - and feels like a traitor. When the men set off on another mountain tour, only one of them returns. Was it an accident or murder?

Mysterious deaths are occurring in Basel: people are dying out of the blue in public with no apparent cause of death. The coroner, Professor Rüegg, the cantonal doctor Zäslin, and politicians are at a loss and becoming fearful. There are even serious considerations to cancel the upcoming carnival. Rüegg's assistant Andreas Zinstag, who is also dealing with the deaths, lives with his uncle, Jean-Jacques Zinstag, a retired doctor. The latter begins to take an interest in the mysterious deaths. Among his friends, Zinstag develops the theory that people are not dying from a specific disease, but from "death" itself. The Grim Reaper himself is making his presence felt in Basel, as he once did in the Dance of Death.