Trouble Backstairs

During Napoleon's victorious campaign in Germany, the city of Kolberg gets isolated from the retreating Prussian forces. The population of Kolberg refuses to capitulate and organizes the resistance against the French army, which immediately submits the city to massive bombardments. "Kolberg" is a unique document showing a well-oiled propaganda machine collapsing in the face of its immanent demise. It achieves the opposite of its intent. The stolid face at the end of the film with the proto-Nazi flag as a backdrop is supposed to convey a sense of determined conviction but there's fear in those eyes.

A young woman from Sweden (Kristina Söderbaum) living in Hamburg in the summer months attracts a newly married explorer, Albrecht Froben (Carl Raddatz) who has just returned to his native city. But although she seems to be 'life itself', she suffers from a tropical disease which is slowly killing her. Froben is torn between Äls and his wife Octavia (Irene von Mayendorff), who is seen as a kind of 'heavenly' counterpart to the earthy Äls.

Germany, 1890: Having just gotten his high-school diploma, Hans leaves for Heidelberg to begin his university studies. But first, he wants to visit his uncle, Pastor Hoppe, in the small village of Rosenau. It's here that he again meets his cousin and childhood friend Annie. Annie is the illegitimate child of Pastor Hoppe's sister, who's left the upbringing of her offspring to the man-of-the-cloth. Conservative chaplain Schigorski continually tries to convince Annie to join the nearby cloister and thus "atone" for the sins of her mother. And it's getting more difficult for the fun-loving girl to escape the chaplain's harrassment. When Hans arrives, old feelings of lust come back to the surface.

Der Herrscher (The Sovereign) was based on Before Sunset, a play by Gerhart Hauptmann. The great Emil Jannings stars as Mathias Clausen, a self-made businessman who is forced to do a great deal of soul-searching when his wife unexpectedly dies. Determining to start life anew, he falls in love with his secretary Inken (Marianne Hoppe) and impulsively takes a vacation to Italy. Clausen's selfish grown children, not wishing to share their father's affections -- nor his money -- with his new wife-to-be, go to court demanding that Clausen be declared mentally incompetent. Upon finding this out, Clausen flies into a rage, leaving the audience to wonder whether or not he really as gone off his trolley. Der Herrscher was directed by Veit Harlan, more famous (or notorious) for his viciously anti-Semitic Jud Suess (1940).

Sylvia has succeeded in making her son Robert a minister in the French Republic. His old servent, Gabriel, interrupts the young man during an "erotic" conference with the singer Betty. She's there, because her politically inappropriate songs is about to get her banned from the stage, which the minister would like to prevent. A fight breaks out between Robert and Gabriel and Sylvia, his mother, has to confess to Robert, that Gabriel is actually his father. When the minister once again misbehaves, this time at a ball, his servant and father Gabriel decides that the time has come to slap his son in everyone's presence. Robert is forced to resign and a journalist from the People's Front suggests Gabriel for the post of minister. - The film was classified after the end of the german third empire as a reservation film.