German History in the Movies

Kaspar Hauser is the son of the duke of Baden. At the age of one he was swapped by another baby that has been killed right after the change. The real Kaspar Hauser grew up in prison without light, social contacts and education for more than ten years. As teenager he came to public again. First he had to learn a language and other basic skills. Before Kaspar Hauser, meanwhile well educated, found out his real idendity, he was killed.

A young man named Kaspar Hauser suddenly appears in Nuremberg in 1828, barely able to talk or walk, and bearing a strange note.

A look at Germany's terrorist group, The Red Army Faction (RAF), which organized bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and assassinations in the late 1960s and '70s.

A comic look at the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989, told from the point of view of the German border guards at the checkpoint where it all started.

True tale about two men planning to escape from communist East Germany in a hot air balloon, but only if they can take their families with them.

Ulrich Mühe plays a German businessman who was born completely without scruples. This makes him an eminently suitable candidate for success in the chaotic years after World War I. The shameless man's story is contrasted with that of his polar opposite, a Jewish anarchist.

Set in 1904, this is an uneven tale of war and intrigue between native South Africans, German colonialists, and British colonialists, a war no one really wins.

When their ship is sunk in the first world war, in the Indian ocean, 50 men have to cross infinite stretches of sea and desert, avoid enemies, find allies and finally make it home to Germany. A breathtaking real-live odyssey.

Barkeeper Frank, semi-formally called "Herr Lehmann", is part of a lethargic West Berlin-microcosm. His lifestyle is disturbed when his parents show up for a visit, things go awry with his girlfriend and his best friend acts strange.

A group of kids grows up on the east side of the Sonnenallee in Berlin, right next to one of the few border crossings between East and West Germany. The antics of the people on Sonnenallee all show the absurdity of their everyday life.

Julian is a 12-year-old boy whose family is just scraping by in the Ruhr industrial region of Germany in the early 1960s . When his mother and younger sister go away for a while, he is left mostly alone in the apartment while his father works in the coal mine. He has to confront the confusing world of adults and older boys and the older girl next door on his own. Finally events build up and threaten to tear the family apart.

Saga of a miner and his family in the Ruhr area of Western Germany in the time from the the late1800s until World War I.

A boy learns the black arts from an evil sorcerer.

A young boy becomes an apprentice for a mysterious sorcerer, working at the sorcerer's strange and sinister mill where secretive black magic is being taught and performed at a very heavy price.

In 1933 Nuremberg, Leo Katzenberger is a successful Jewish businessman and a devoted family man. As the climate in Germany grows increasingly dangerous, bombshell Irene moves to the neighborhood and everything changes.

As the Allies sweep across Germany, Lore leads her siblings on a journey that exposes them to the truth of their parents' beliefs. An encounter with a mysterious refugee forces Lore to rely on a person she has always been taught to hate.

A man's story parallels Hitler's rise. Austrian Klaus Schneider, wounded in World War I, recovers in the care of Dr. Emil Bettleheim. Bettleheim discovers that Schneider possesses powers of empathy and of clairvoyance, such that could aid suicidal patients. After the war, with one friend as his manager and another as his lover, Schneider changes his name to Eric Jan Hanussen and goes to Berlin, as a hypnotist and clairvoyant performing in halls and theaters. He always speaks the truth, which brings him to the attention of powerful Nazis. He predicts their rise (good propaganda for them) and their violence (not so good). He's in pain and at risk. What is Hanussen's future?

In early-1930s Germany, a passionate stage actor faces a dilemma: renounce his apolitical stance and comply with the Reich's doctrine, or face oblivion. But, Faustian bargains never end well. What is the price of success?

The poet and bon vivant Clemens Brentano no longer wants to be an artist. In hopes of becoming a better person, he turned to the Catholic religion.

A look at the lives of 19th-century composers Clara and Robert Schumann.

The life and death of the legendary Ludwig van Beethoven. Besides all the work he is known for, the composer once wrote a famous love letter to a nameless beloved, and the movie tries to find out who this beloved was--not easy, as Beethoven has had many women in his life.

A fictionalized account of the last year of Beethoven's life.

Young seminary student Franziskus (Benjamin Besson) has been ceremonially ordained. He wants to escape the harshness and injustice of the world and devote himself to the service of God in the quiet seclusion of a monastery. He is also hoping to forget the beautiful lady Aurelie (Jaroslava Schallerová), whose life he saved in a flooded brook and with whom he spent an amorous night. He knows that her father would never allow her to marry him. But the devil dressed in a monk's habit and under the name Viktorin (Andrzej Kopiczynski) intervenes in Franziskus's destiny and attempts to lead him astray. To do so he first uses the diabolical elixirs kept at the monastery as a rare relic. When the young monk gets expelled from the monastery, Viktorin prepares another trap with the help of Aurelie's stepmother Euphemie (Milena Dvorská).

During the Thirty Years' War of 1600s, a band of Protestant mercenaries peacefully coexist with German Catholic villagers in a hidden idyllic mountain valley untouched by war.

Traudl Junge, the final secretary for Adolf Hitler, tells of the Nazi dictator's final days in his Berlin bunker at the end of WWII.