Kurt Cramer

Walter Gruber once belonged to a group of unscrupulous, money-grubbing poachers. Now released from prison, he is determined never to touch a gun again. He was imprisoned for poaching, but they couldn't prove he fired the shot that wounded forester Kuhnert. Upon his return home, Walter is horrified to discover that his former lover, Kuhnert's daughter Grete, has since married someone else. Grete still loves Walter, with whom she was pregnant. But her father would have made life a living hell for her and the child had she not married another man. This man, Robert Thiele, is still poaching and is extremely ruthless in his methods. Robert eventually blackmails Walter into rejoining the poachers. When the gang shoots the old forester Kuhnert, Robert shifts suspicion onto Walter.

In Annemarie Brinkmann's small German village all the young men are recruited to the front in WWI. When her boyfriend Klaus Renken gets the call they spend their last romantic night together. Time goes by but one day when the pastor announces the names of the fallen villagers: Klaus is among them. Annemarie collapses while the congregation sings a funeral song.

Jule (Heidemarie Hatheyer), a 25 year old women is not having an easy life. Her cousin Stefan Rüdiger (Albert Matterstock) has left "manor Jobshagen" as an 18 year old and Jule has had to manage business since then. Her uncle, Stefan's father, never could get over the leaving of his son and isolated himself from the world. Jule, once a blithe youngster, became a tough woman by the time. And there are heavy debts on the manor Jobshagen, 6000 Marks. The innkeeper Meyer could give Jule the money, but he wants a big part of the estates of manor Jobshagen for exchange and that is the last thing that Jule would accept.

A dancing girl succeeds in getting Napoleon, in 1808, to pardon her lover, a German artist who has drawn an unflattering caricature of the French emperor during his Erfurt conference with the Czar and several local princes.

A horse trader from Berlin, once a farmer in Southwest Africa, manages to drive his children out of the house and anger his wife. After serious complications with his heart, which he tried to hide at first, he realizes how much he needs the love and support of his family. The oldest son returns from Argentina and proves his abilities.

A Prussian commander disobeys orders and goes to find a British envoy who can negotiate a pact with Austria to help fight off Napoleon in 1806.