Hildegard Alex

It's the 24th of December: The emergency department of a district hospital is preparing for a turbulent night: head physician Professor Singer, who has lost his wife and is even more involved in the work, and the surgeon Hannah Cornelsen, who talks about the work can forget that she and her husband have dwelt apart. On Christmas Eve, the hospital will become a microcosm in which a wide variety of people and destinies will meet - and for everyone, life will be in a completely different light next morning.

Shortly before Christmas, Dresden lawyer Julius Weimann is expecting his beloved daughter Julia. The 19-year-old has been in the USA for a year. When he picks her up from the plane with her godfather Harald Mauthe and takes her into his arms, he realizes that the "little polar bear" has become a young woman. To Julius' surprise, she has brought the man of her dreams with her from the States, whom she wants to marry at Christmas. Thomas Berner is an event manager from Dresden and fifteen years older than Julia! When Julia realizes that her father has hired a private detective to keep tabs on her fiancé, it causes a rift between father and daughter. With a heavy heart, Julius finally comes to accept his future son-in-law, and after clearing up a misunderstanding, the two men even become friends. But then Julia gets cold feet and breaks up with Thomas.

A series of explosions carried out by an oil drilling platform in the North Sea causes little earthquakes and alarm the population of coastal areas closest to the epicenter.

Paula Semmelrogge's little store is under threat. But a blow with a frying pan turns the old, withered and stingy retired lawyer and landlord Riemer into the youthful lover he has always suppressed within himself. Compulsions now fall off him like chains, and he finally gives in to the urge to get into bed with his tenant Paula and abandons the plan to sell the house. Much to the chagrin of real estate agent Suhr, whom he thus deprives of his business.

The story of German minority members who, after escaping from Wehrmacht, form a partisan unit named "Ernst Thalmann" in eastern Croatia. The focus is a family whose members fight on different sides of the barricade.

A story about massive robbery from the safe of German railways set in 1946.

In a small town, everyone has tried to forget what happened shortly after WWII. That is, until a stranger finds a book that Jadup (Kurt Böwe) gave to the young refugee Boel (Katrin Knappe), who resettled in the town over 30 years ago. Painful memories about Boel and the post-war period begin to surface and shake up the whole town. Boel vanished back then and nobody knew why. Word spread about a rape and some tried to blame a Russian soldier. Jadup, the town's respected and popular mayor, remembers, though, how he mistrusted Boel and did not help her through this difficult time; HE didn't even notice THAT Boel loved him. Jadup's confrontation with the past gives him a new, critical view of his current situation and surroundings.

Christine inherits a sailboat from her father, whom she barely knew. Christine is a divorced single mother and her job at a research insitute leaves her with too much work and too little time to sail. She can't find anyone to buy the boat at full value, so she tries to repair it over the winter in the hopes of being able to get a better price in the spring. Working on the boat become something of an obsession to the detriment of Christine's relationships with her son, boyfriend and collegues. When the boat is finally ready to sell, she isn't sure that she is willing to part with it after all.

This elaborate two-part television film features a section from the life of communist worker leader Ernst Thälmann. It begins with the bloody riots on May 1, 1929 in Berlin, in which police officers shot at demonstrating workers, and ends with February 7, 1933, when Thälmann appeared as a speaker at the illegal meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany in goat neck. This period was marked by the struggle of the Communists against the ever stronger National Socialists and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Young construction worker Ralf Reider leaves his home village Katzsprung in the Rhön mountains during the "Berlin Initiative". In the capital, he wants to earn enough money in construction to build his own house for his wife and his child. But Ralf is an unconventional character who soon becomes an outsider because of his behaviour.