Ruth is the wife of well-heeled corsetry manufacturer Erich Halbfass. As business booms, Erich lives frivolously and their daughter Aglaia attends school. The bored middle-class wife begins a secret affair with Aglaia's drawing teacher, setting murder and manslaughter in motion.

A divorced thirtysomething woman fights a losing battle in Munich to attain belated self-fulfillment. The die is cast in a briskly impersonal society geared to male dominance and early training for career women.

An exploration of the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.

In an attempt to escape 19th-century poverty, eight farmers and day laborers attack a prince's money transport in the Hessian Hinterland.