The architect Daniel Brenner is in his late thirties when he receives his first challenging and lucrative commission: to design a cultural center for a satellite town in East-Berlin. He accepts the offer under the condition that he gets to choose who he works with. This way, he reunites with former colleagues and friends - most of them architects or students of architecture who have since chosen a different profession due to personal restraint or economic confinement. Together, they develop a concept which they hope will be more appealing to the public than the conventional and dull constructions common to the German Democratic Republic. However, their ambitious plans are once and again foiled by their conservative supervisors. As frustration grows, Daniel has trouble keeping his career in balance with his family-life: his wife Wanda wants to leave for West-Germany.

The story of a 14-year-old boy's problems. Unable to overcome his parents' divorce, Steffen mutates into a "failure" and has to repeat year 7 at school. His mother and teachers are helpless and disappointed in the boy. He remains withdrawn from them and builds his own world by escaping to an old tower where he secretly writes poetry. Franziska, one of Steffen's classmates, is very fond of him and stands up for him; she fights for Steffen's fair treatment. Then the friendship between the two young people is put to the test by the boy's mistrust.

In the forests of the Ore Mountains, on the border with Bohemia, a gang of smugglers is up to mischief. Anyone who dares to oppose them is murdered in cold blood. The locals are paralyzed by fear of the ominous bush ghost that is said to be behind it all. Then a stranger turns up at the remote forester's lodge and begins investigating a murder that took place twenty years ago. Having become wealthy in the Alaskan gold fields, Arndt is now looking for the woman he once loved and whose perjury landed him in prison. The forester and the weaver Eduard Hauser help him with his investigations. But Hauser himself soon becomes the victim of a sinister intrigue. Fritz Seidelmann, an unscrupulous profiteer who is after Hauser's fiancée Angelika, lures him into a trap. Hauser is arrested as an alleged bush ghost. For the time being, Arndt can do nothing for him ...

Three children of a single father escape from the town in order to find a houseboat which was once owned by their mother.

Last years in the Life of german Dramatican Georg Büchner. Around the year 1830 he and his fellow students try to initiate a revolution in Germany, but they are not successful. Büchner has to leave the country and seeks exile in France and Switzerland, where he falls ill with typhus.

The early 1930s in Berlin. Cabaret artist Emil Damaschke wants to entertain people with his program - together with Ida, the attraction from Hungary. But because he risks a lip that is too big, he is thrown out of the "Rosenthaler" cabaret, ends up on the criminal circuit and briefly in prison. Back out again, he and his colleagues leased the "Rosenthaler", whose Jewish owners had fled abroad to escape the Nazis. They set up a cooperative. However, a gang of criminals who professed allegiance to the Nazis wanted a share of the profits and believed they had a free ride. Emil rejects Ida's intention to win over the workers as a new audience, he makes money with advertising and refuses to join the criminals. They kidnap Ida, murder her in the forest and make sure that Emil is framed for the murder. Emil ends up in prison and the criminals take over the cabaret - in Nazi uniform.

Based on a switched identity, in circumstances that are found in real life as well as fiction, this drama tells the story of two soldiers fighting together in World War I. Karl (Joachim Latsch) and Richard (Hans-Use Bauer) become close friends while serving time in a German POW camp. One day Karl manages a successful escape and goes to Richard's home where he seeks refuge posing as Richard. But Richard's wife Anna (Kathrin Waligura) has never given up hope that her husband is still alive -- a possibility that would shatter Karl's proposed new life. In fact, Richard did not die in the POW camp. This film shared the Grand Prix award at the 1985 Berlin Film Festival.