This historical satire, based on Heinrich Mann's world-famous novel, Der Untertan, is ranked by film critics among the 100 Most Significant German Films of all time. In Mann's biting critique of conservative Wilhelmine Germany, written during WWI, Diederich Hessling learns an important lesson for an ambitious man: one must first serve power to gain power for oneself. From then on, his modus operandi is to bow to superiors and kick underlings.

Based upon Herman Bang's 1902 novel, Dreyer's Michael refashions the classical Greek myth of Jupiter and Ganymede into a love triangle between an aging artist, Zoret (director Benjamin Christensen), his protagonist Michael (Walter Slezak, later to play the Nazi villain in Hitchcock's Lifeboat) and Princess Zamikoff (Nora Gregor, Rules of the game), an aristocratic femme fatale as entranced by Michael's youthful beauty as Zoret is. As Michael plunges...

Follows a group of German recruits during World War I, whose patriotism soon turns to disillusionment.

This playlist includes the following special features from Kuhle wampe or Who owns the world, How the Berlin worker lives (dir. Slatan Dudow, 1930) Slatan Dudow: a film about a marxist artist (dir. Volker Koepp, 1974) original prologue, with Herbert Jhering, 1958.

The first German feature film to explicitly address the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, Marriage in the shadows called on Germans to accept collective responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. Stylistically, the production, in which many former Ufa artists were involved, blends classic melodrama in the Ufa style with documentary glimpses into life in Berlin under the Nazis. Shown in all four sectors of occupied Berlin and across Germany,...

Shortly before GDR’s collapse, Helke Misselwitz traveled by train from one end of the country to the other interviewing East German women of different ages and backgrounds. In this documentary masterpiece, women reveal their personal and professional frustrations, hopes and aspirations—and, in doing so, paint a portrait of a changing society. The landscape and architecture of East Germany, filmed in B&W on 35mm by Thomas Plenert, form the background...

"Based on the true story of the Black September aftermath, about the five men chosen to eliminate the ones responsible for that fateful day"-- IMDb.

In his bittersweet comedy loaded with human quirks and nuance, Jacob invents news reports to bolster the spirits of the other Jews living in his Polish ghetto under Nazi occupation. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1977, the story was remade in Hollywood starring Robin Williams in 1999. In a Polish ghetto in 1944, Jacob Heym is summoned to the police station. While there, Jacob overhears on the radio that "the Russians are twenty...

Based on the true event, Colonel von Stauffenberg and his fellow officers attempt to assassinate the Führer.