The Best of German Cinema

Cologne-Ehrenfeld, November 1944. They're young, wild and rebellious, like young people anywhere and in any time. But working-class boys Karl and his younger brother Peter are Edelweiss Pirates. They oppose the Nazis, and are pursued by the Gestapo. With the escaped concentration camp prisoner Hans Steinbrück they plan acts of sabotage, until the Gestapo take them on with their full might. When they're arrested, Karl is torn between his will to survive, his feelings of responsibility, his love for his brother and his loyalty to the Edelweiss Pirates.

In World War II, the sanitation engineer and family man Kurt Gerstein is assigned by SS to be the Head of the Institute for Hygiene to purify the water for the German Army in the front. Later, he is invited to participate in termination of plagues in the concentration camps and he develops the lethal gas Zyklon-B. When he witnesses that the SS is killing Jews instead, he decides to denounce the genocide to the Pope to expose to the world and save the Jewish families. The idealist Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana from an influent Italian family gives his best efforts being the liaison of Gerstein and the leaders of the Vatican.

Based on a true story a group of East Berliners escaping to the West. Harry Melchior was a champion East German swimmer at odds with the system under which he has already been imprisoned. On his own escape, he is determined the arrange the escape to the West of his sister and her family. The idea of the tunnel is born, but the project does not run smoothly. The participants struggle not only with the massive logistics of their task, but betrayal from friends in the East. And always the East German police are close to discovering the plot.

After nine years in psychiatric detention Theo, who has brutally assaulted and raped three women, is released. Living in a supervised community, he connects well with his social worker Sascha, finds a job at a print shop and even a girlfriend, Nettie, his principal's brittle and estranged daughter. But even though superficially everything seems to work out Theo's seething rage remains ready to erupt.

Germany in the 1970s: Murderous bomb attacks, the threat of terrorism, and the fear of the enemy inside are rocking the very foundations of the yet-fragile German democracy. The radicalized children of the Nazi generation led by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Ensslin are fighting a violent war against what they perceive as the new face of fascism: American imperialism supported by the German establishment, many of whom have a Nazi past. Their aim is to create a more human society, but by employing inhuman means they not only spread terror and bloodshed; they also lose their own humanity. The man who understands them is also their hunter: Horst Herold, head of the German police force. And while he succeeds in his relentless pursuit of the young terrorists, he knows he's only dealing with the tip of the iceberg.

A tale based on the life of Wilhelm Furtwangler, the controversial conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic whose tenure coincided with the controversial Nazi era. One of the most spectacular and renowned conductors of the 1930s, Furtwangler's reputation rivalled that of Toscanini's. After the war, he was investigated as part of the Allies' de-Nazification program. In the bombed-out Berlin of the immediate post-war period, the Allies slowly bring law and order, and justice, to bear in an occupied Germany. An American Major is given the Furtwangler file, and is told to find everything he can and to prosecute the man ruthlessly. Tough and hard-nosed, Major Steve Arnold sets out to investigate a world of which he knows nothing. Orchestra members vouch for Furtwangler's morality. He did what he could to protect Jewish players from his orchestra. To the Germans, deeply respectful of their musical heritage, Furtwangler was a demigod; to Major Arnold, he is just a lying, weak-willed Nazi.

Driving through the countryside, Kati, Jochen and Lukas take some magic mushrooms. One of them, Lukas, is not coming down from them. Hearing voices like multiple different low turned radio programs, changing and mixing altogether. The diagnosis of the physician: paranoid schizophrenia. Not able to filter and interpret the sensations presented he encounters fear, inner voices, paranoia and is drifting away from reality.

April 1945: 19-year-old Gregor Hecker reaches the outskirts of Berlin as part of the Red Army's scouting team. Having fled Germany with his family when he was eight, he is confronted with the dilemma of having to fight men from his birth country. Through dealing with challenging situations (e.g. he is appointed commander of Bernau, talks to many disillusioned Germans, and keeps getting attacked by scattered groups of German soldiers), he grows more confident that not all hope is lost for post-war Germany. Based on the diary entries of director Konrad Wolf, the episodic movie authentically portrays the protagonist's struggle to come to terms with his own past and identity.

The year is 1943 and the "last of the Jews" are being "evacuated" from Berlin. They are locked in cattle cars with no food and little water. During the trip several of the characters are drawn out and vignettes of their lives are highlighted to restore some humanity to their animal existence aboard the train. The suffering and agony is palpable. Some parts can be watched in double speed as they are just just filler. If you exclude the final theatrical device thrown in at the end, the movie is worth watching for it's historical relevance.

A Jewish family in Germany emigrate short before the Second World War. They move to Kenya to start running a farm, but not all members of the family come to an arrangement with their new life. Shortly after their departure, things are changing in Germany very quickly, and a turning back seems impossible. So everyone has to arrange himself with the new life in a new continent.

During the Second World War, a small group of students at Munich University begin to question the decisions and sanity of Germany's Nazi government. The students form a resistance cell which they name the "White Rose" after a newsletter that is secretly distributed to the student body. At first small in numbers and fearful of discovery, the White Rose begins to gain massive support after a Nazi Gauleiter nearly incites a student riot after a provokative speech. At this point, the matter is taken over by the German Gestapo, who pledge to hunt down and destroy the members of the White Rose.

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 Lenam who tells the story of a week in 1943 when the Jewish husbands of Aryan women were detained in a building on Rosenstrasse and the women gathered daily for word of their husbands. The film goes back and forth to tell Ruth and Lena's story. How will it affect Hannah?

A depiction of the brutal battle of Stalingrad, the Third Reich's 'high water mark', as seen through the eyes of German officer Hans von Witzland and his battalion.

During WWII, a head priest, Henri Kremer, is mysteriously freed from Dachau concentration camp. He learns that he can return home, to Luxembourg, for a period of nine days, during which he will have to face a persuasive Gestapo chief who will put his faith to the test.

As prisoner of war Clemens Forell, a German soldier during WW II, is sentenced to a labor camp in far east Siberia. After four years working in the mines he escapes from the camp (in 1949) and tries to get home to his wife and children. For three years he journeys through Siberia. An odyssey of 14,000 kilometers, set against a backdrop of desolate and inhospitable landscape, beset by danger (from both animals and humans). Constantly battling the worst nature can throw at him, Forell makes his way, step by step towards Prussia and the longed-for freedom. Sometimes riding on trains, sometimes by boat, mostly on foot, he never knows if his next step won't be his last. His prosecutor Kamenev is always right behind him, and more than once it seems that Forell is captured again...

When Martin, a former GDR citizen, is released from jail, he lately becomes confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification.

A nameless woman keeps a diary as the Russians invade Berlin in the spring of 1945. She is in her early 30s, a patriotic journalist with international credentials; her husband, Gerd, a writer, is an officer at the Russian front. She speaks Russian and, for a day or two after the invasion, keeps herself safe, but then the rapes begin. She resolves to control her fate and invites the attentions of a Russian major, Andreij Rybkin. He becomes her protector of sorts subject to pressures from his own fellow soldiers and officers. Dramas play out in the block of flats where she lives. Is she an amoral traitor? She asks, "How do we go on living?" And what of Gerd and her diary?

The Final Days is the true story of Germany's most famous anti-Nazi heroine brought to life. Sophie Scholl is the fearless activist of the underground student resistance group, The White Rose. Using historical records of her incarceration, the film re-creates the last six days of Sophie Scholl's life: a journey from arrest to interrogation, trial and sentence in 1943 Munich. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to her comrades, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility that is both haunting and timeless.