Kati drives the VW bus of her parents even without a license quite fast. But what else should one do in the Bavarian province? Kati and her best friend Jo keep asking themselves this question when they philosophize about God and the world with the tip in one hand and the beer in the other hand. After all, Kati's swarm Mike has just come back from the Bundeswehr, but while she dreams of the great love, he seems to take the matter far less seriously. And there's only stress with her dad.

After they have graduated from school, the two best friends Kati and Jo jump into their purple Benz and embark on a journey around the world southwards. Kati, however, struggled with the decision for the journey as the love of her life returned to their hometown Tandern shortly before their departure. The journey leads the two friends over the Brenner pass, where their car suddenly stops working. When Kati then also learns that her grandfather is about to die, she wants to return home – this puts the friendship of the two to an acid test.

Bavaria, Germany, 1950s. The sudden return of the young Kathrin to the small village where she was born stirs up the feelings of guilt and personal ghosts of its inhabitants, haunted by dark memories related to a multiple murder that happened two years earlier at the Tannöd farm, a hideous crime that remains unsolved.

When German police viciously quell a protest against the shah of Iran, popular journalist Ulrike Meinhof rebels against her dishonest marriage, walks away from her children and joins radical anarchist Andreas Baader. Together with Baader's girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, they form the violent Red Faction Army, and together perpetrate a slew of terrorist attacks as a way of disrupting the fabric of what they see as an increasingly fascist state.

Richthofen goes off to war like thousands of other men. As fighter pilots, they become cult heroes for the soldiers on the battlefields. Marked by sportsmanlike conduct, technical exactitude and knightly propriety, they have their own code of honour. Before long he begins to understand that his hero status is deceptive. His love for Kate, a nurse, opens his eyes to the brutality of war.

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.

May 1944, a group of French servicewomen and resistance fighters are enlisted into the British Special Operations Executive commando group under the command of Louise Desfontaines and her brother Pierre. Their mission, to rescue a British army geologist caught reconnoitering the beaches at Normandy.

Fleeing from the Nazis, two children, a journalist father, and a dog must make their way through the hazardous Pyrenees mountain range.

Baal, a young artist whom society regards as a genius, does not want to be monopolized by the culture and business.

Drama about the tragic Nanga Parbat expedition by the two Messner brothers in 1970, on which Reinhold Messners younger brother Günther died.