Ortwin Speer

24 hours on the border between East and West Germany. In an outlying West Berlin district, police officers chat about their personal lives, take care of petty offence and at most, warn the odd rubbernecker away from the border to the “Soviet zone”. Meanwhile their East German counterparts are under enormous pressure. The day begins with disciplinary action after one of the border guards was found sleeping on duty. The supervisors demand utmost vigilance and a solid ideological bent, and suspicion and mistrust are the rule within the ranks of these soldiers of the National People’s Army (NVA). Unnoticed by the soldiers, four East Berlin students are preparing to flee to the west. But in the morning mists, only their accomplice, an NVA private, succeeds …

Berlin, Germany, 1935. The day Karl Weiss, a Jewish painter, and Inga Helms, a Christian woman, marry, is the one in which both of them and the entire Weiss family are caught up in the maelstrom of the Nazi regime, the storms of World War II and the horrors of the criminal Final Solution, the Holocaust, the Shoah; while Erik Dorf, an ambitious lawyer, undertakes his fall into hell at the hands of the sinister Reinhard Heydrich.