Wolf-Dietrich Sprenger
Max Helmer, son of Paul Helmer, a great businessman, must now work for a while as domestic help to know better what is work and the value of money.He will help Elena and her children.
Young Duke Ernest wants to become a good knight. The circumstances are not in his favor: The emperor wants to claim the Duke´s castle and marry his mother. He has Ermest wrongfully accused of murder and thrown in the dungeon. Duke Ernest´s only chance to escape a death sentence is to join the army and to go to the orient in search of the legendary Carbuncle Stone. He´ll have to overcome carnivorous rocks, magnetic mountains, the giant bird Rock and many more.
Set in Hamburg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it. He becomes a small-time pimp, sending his naive girlfriend out onto the streets thinking she is financing their middle-class future. When he becomes involved with an old pal, Nil, he increases his criminal portfolio. But when he steals Nil's girlfriend and things heat up, he leaves for his sister's middle-class home in Berlin, where his attempts to fit in are doomed from the start. Returning to Hamburg, he starts a rapid decline that delivers him into the waiting arms of Nil, whose revenge is merciless. Its emphasis more on milieu than on melodrama, Kiev is intended as a disturbing, hard look at the lives of bourgeois society's cast-offs whose existence, in Germany as elsewhere, is comfortably ignored or suppressed.
A small carnival is in dire financial straits. Their show is attracting fewer and fewer paying customers, as their "attractions" are ageing, out of shape and beset by internal feuds and bickering. One day a beautiful young woman shows up and suggests a way of attracting customers: put on a strip show, with her as the main attraction. Her act attracts customers in droves, but it turns out that the girl has her own agenda, and it isn't to help out the carnival.
