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1-36 of 36
- A star-studded roster of interviewees (including Jerry Lewis, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal) pay tribute to the legendary, multi-talented song-and-dance man.
- In 1982, "The Boat", a West German war film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, gained worldwide notoriety, even reaching the Oscars, where it was nominated in six categories. Nothing predestined this film to such a triumph. Its biases and the events of the shooting promised it a fate of cursed film. Inspired by a true story - the descent into hell of a German submarine and its crew during the Second World War -, the script was a risky bet from the outset: how would the public react to a claustrophobic closed-door film lasting more than three hours and featuring the wrong side?
- Two people die within 24 hours in a small village on the Swabian Alb. The resident physician assumes natural causes of death. The Undertaker Lisa, however, suspects murder and thus brings the investigation in motion.
- A documentary about the life of a German citizen abducted by the CIA in 2003.
- The year is 2044 in the midst of a new world order and the European Federal State of Germany. All resources have been privatized, including the police and unemployment services. Norman Bauer, a down-and-out freelance detective is tasked with solving a murder case on the outskirts of his hometown. He finds clues to the crime in a menacing and mysterious environmental no-go area called the "Zone". Broke and bored of his everyday life, Bauer accepts the assignment despite its dangers. His investigation uncovers not only the murderer, but a confounding conspiracy involving the officials in the government that employ him. Increasingly he finds himself tangled in a web of mystery and insanity that distorts his understanding of his own consciousness. This blurs the lines of his escapist virtual, and explicit realities.
- Summer 1942: Day and night freight trains rattle to the east. After the debacle of the Winter War in 1941, the German troops again take up the offensive. This time in the south of the Soviet Union, 3,000 kilometres from their homeland. The soldiers often spend days at the "Waggontoaster" playing cards. Many are thrown directly from the barracks courtyard to the front: "We were completely disoriented. We also didn't know what to expect. We knew the war only from the newspaper, the newsreel or from the roar of our trainers about the heroic deaths of our predecessors. "Operation Blau", summer offensive, hardly anyone can imagine anything about it. "We arrived and were lying in the dirt with our faces. The boys always got it first." The targets: the petroleum area in the Caucasus, the Volga near Stalingrad. Half a year later, Stalin's city became a symbol of the turning point in the Second World War. An army is destroyed in the Stalingrad cauldron. "In a few days they made our whole company into a sow", traumatic experiences of the few survivors. The suffering and dying of the 6th army is spread in countless articles, books and films. The many small "Stalingrads" of the Eastern Front are hardly mentioned - they are unspectacular and yet characteristic for "the quite normal dying at the front", everyday war life. A film in eyewitness interviews and day orders of the Wehrmacht about the "quite normal madness" at the Eastern Front.
- Nuclear power has always been marked by controversy. Passionately advocated and opposed, protected and feared. For some countries - above all Germany - it seems to be on the way to becoming a discontinued model. But is it really?
- At the beginning of the 1980s, a new epidemic came over the world with AIDS. Epidemics were never extinct, they spread fear and terror - in every age. The increase in scientific knowledge has not changed this. New reports are heard almost daily: deadly epidemics with Ebola viruses, new pathogens cause mad cow disease, antibiotics fail against multi-resistant bacteria. Worse still: the old "great epidemics" are returning. The cause: poverty, misery, hunger and wars, collapse of health systems in the East, spread through mass tourism, open borders and globalisation. The three-part television series "The Diseases" describes three of the classic "scourges of humanity": tuberculosis, cholera and syphilis. The films show spread, causes and historical consequences: effects of the respective disease on culture and society, dealing with the infected, scientific search for pathogens and treatment options. "Currently not to extinct !" - is the WHO's declaration of bankruptcy. Particularly in Bengal, Africa and South America, cholera claims tens of thousands of victims every year. The treatment is not a problem, as long as simple medical facilities are available - and - clean water. Conventional vaccines have lost their effectiveness - the side effects are considerable. Developing new vaccines suitable for children costs a lot of money. The pharmaceutical industry has no interest in production - the victims are not solvent, the epidemics are far away. In its cultural arrogance, the Occident felt safe from the Indian epidemic. But especially in the centres of the so-called cultural states: Berlin, Paris, London, and in the rich port cities such as Hamburg, the epidemic struck particularly relentlessly and unmasked the social grievances here. Dying of cholera is unappetizing and often takes place in public. Death often comes within hours. This simply leaves no time for a fateful transfiguration of the disease. At the beginning of the 20th century, cholera set itself in motion from the Indian subcontinent. In 1830 it was on the borders of Central Europe. Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, the great Prussian theorist on the art of war, fails to avert the epidemic by military means. He dies of it. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch compete to be the first to discover the pathogen. Here, too, it took 50 years to find an effective medical therapy. But as long as there is poverty, misery and war, the disease cannot be defeated.
- At the beginning of the 1980s, a new epidemic came over the world with AIDS. Epidemics were never extinct, they spread fear and terror - in every age. The increase in scientific knowledge has not changed this. New reports are heard almost daily: deadly epidemics with Ebola viruses, new pathogens cause mad cow disease, antibiotics fail against multi-resistant bacteria. Worse still: the old "great epidemics" are returning. The cause: poverty, misery, hunger and wars, collapse of health systems in the East, spread through mass tourism, open borders and globalisation. The three-part television series "The Diseases" describes three of the classic "scourges of humanity": tuberculosis, cholera and syphilis. The films show spread, causes and historical consequences: effects of the respective disease on culture and society, dealing with the infected, scientific search for pathogens and treatment options. Tuberculosis is the most common infectious disease today. About two billion people are infected and three million die from it every year. The trend is rising. The causes are multi-resistant germs - a time bomb for the industrial nations. The danger comes, among others, from the slums of the former Soviet Union. Overcrowded prisons are often the breeding ground for the disease. The film shows the development of consumption as the most important cause of death in the last and penultimate century. How it changed in social and literary perception - from a romantically transfigured disease of the young elite to what it always was: a disease of misery. Prominent tuberculosis patients were Frédéric Chopin and Franz Kafka. The film uses their curriculum vitae to describe the symptoms of the disease and the long death of the consumptive. Almost 60 years after Robert Koch's discovery of the pathogen and the development of X-ray diagnostics, the disease was defeated with effective antibiotics - this seemed to be the case until a few years ago ...
- Just one year after the Nazis seized power, radio and the press were switched to the same channel. The supreme control organ was the Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. On February 10, 1933, he declared that a "good government" had to carry out "good propaganda," which was a prerequisite for a "spiritual mobilization. His most important weapon: newly founded propaganda companies. The Reichspropagandachef demands that the "slovenliness" in reporting should cease and has word reporters, cameramen and photographers trained in a specially founded Wehrmachtsschule in Potsdam. Goebbels' propaganda war was quickly as effective a weapon as the fighting troops of the infantry, navy or air force. In more than 6000 German cinemas, "Die Deutsche Wochenschau" provided a collage of constantly advancing troops in picture, sound and commentary from the beginning of the war. Whether in Poland, France or Norway: only one can win - the German soldier. Towards the end of the war, the weekly newsreel mainly delivered perseverance slogans. But even Goebbels swayed that the reality of the last days of the war was difficult to adjust. In one of the last issues, the weekly newsreel shows Hitler with his last posse in Berlin: children as cannon fodder. It does not show the wreckage of the Führer, who left behind 50 million dead and mountains of rubble and predicts that his end will also be the end of all Germans. Until the end, the following is true: reality is what you make of it. History will one day be formed from our pictures, boasted Goebbels at the beginning of the war. In the end, all that remained for the Germans was the hope of a miracle.
- 11 time zones lie between Moscow and the outpost of the Russian giant empire. The Kamchatka peninsula resembles a gigantic powder keg at the eastern end of the world. On the island between the Bering Sea in the west and the Sea of Okhotsk in the east, more than 160 volcanoes, countless geyser valleys and sulphur lakes on almost 370,000 square kilometres mark the visible framework for a phenomenon that geoscientists call the heart of the "Pacific Ring of Fire". For over two million years, tectonic forces have been pushing the Pacific Plate under the edge of Eurasia by 10 centimetres every year. The result: earthquakes and volcanic eruptions shake the 1,200 kilometre long peninsula almost daily. An inferno that Kamchatka's natives have feared for almost 14,000 years as the "gateway to hell". The fishermen and reindeer herders of the Ewenen, Korjaken and Itelmen live in harmony with the elements. Almost nothing was known of all this until 1991. The Russians hermetically sealed off the peninsula mainly because of its mineral resources. During the Cold War it was a military restricted area. In the bay in front of the capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskji lay the nuclear-powered submarine fleet of the Soviet Navy. It was not until the political thaw at the beginning of the 1990s that the Iron Curtain fell. Geoscientists and ethnologists are now gradually discovering an almost untouched paradise whose uniqueness has been protected since 1996 by UNESCO in cooperation with local nature park administrations in six large reserves on a total of 3.32 million hectares as a world natural heritage site.
- They came from the East. Remains of Tatar hordes of mercenaries of the Mongol chan, highwaymen and highwaymen, but also runaway serfs of Russian princes, unfree, peasants who escaped the servitude of the Muscovite Empire. Early on, this mob of outlaws knew a common goal: to fight the Tsar's and Nogaier-Chane's henchmen in the south of the country. Their territories were feared. Hardly a caravan of traders came unscathed through the wild borderland in the Caucasus, the steppes on the Don or through the river delta of the Dnieper. From the Turktatars they adopted the name "Kazak" and already in the 15th century they caused terror and turmoil in the country. Nevertheless, they were never a people - THE Cossacks - and never will be. That belongs in the realm of legends. This film illuminates the myth of the wild warriors of the Caucasus and the Don.
- The second part of the ARD television series "Soldiers for Hitler" illuminates the last years of the Second World War, the decline of the 3rd Reich on all fronts. What happened to those who fought the war, the "soldiers for Hitler"? The beginning of the end began already in 1942. Without the Russian oil in the Caucasus, says Hitler in summer 1942, the war could not be won. To shield the Caucasus operation, the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army were to advance to the Volga. Their goal: Stalingrad. Half a year later, this secondary war theatre became a symbol of the turning point in the Second World War. The suffering and dying of the 6th Army in Stalingrad has often been described, the events in the many small "Stalingrads" of the Eastern Front never received such interest. It took the Red Army two years to free the soil of the Soviet Union from the Germans. During the many retreat massacres the losses of the Wehrmacht are excessive. Everyone wanted to survive at all costs, but at that time this became a pure lottery game. The fear of Russian captivity and of their own quick courts behind the front is so great that they literally fought to the last round. But not only the inferno of the Eastern Front devours hundreds of thousands, also the other theatres of war demand bloody tribute: in North Africa as on the Atlantic, in the air war over England as on the Western Front, there above all after the beginning of the invasion by the Allies in Northwest France in June 1944. They are the last senseless victims of a fanatical leadership, which above all in the fight for Berlin shortly before the unconditional surrender literally "burns" children in the street fight.
- "The future was a dark, dark wall I couldn't see behind. I believed about what was written on the wagons: 'Victory or Siberia'. But victory was no longer in sight. Nor did I have a concrete perspective of life after the war. But I wanted to survive at all costs to see what it would be like." The young private Dieter Wellershoff - a well-known writer in Germany after the war - had to go to the front in the penultimate year of the war, "which was no longer a front". The withdrawal from Russia is associated with immeasurable hardships: hardly any food, no fuel, no ammunition. The losses of the German Wehrmacht are excessive. For some units, the "average length of stay" of the platoon leaders at the front is just ten days. Everyone wants to survive, but this has become a lottery game. In the last one and a half war years far more soldiers fall than in the whole war before. Whole regions fall victim to the increasing brutalization: "On the retreat, those were hopeless escapes, everything was set on fire. The grain, houses, everything was to become "burnt earth". The Russians were to be deprived of the opportunity to feed during the winter." Some soldiers doubted the leadership and the meaning of the whole war. Their conclusion is devastating: "What have we tried to hold the front for? For deporting hundreds of thousands behind our backs, even worse, for killing six million Jews in concentration camps. And I was involved in that. And that's what I still can't cope with today."
- He dreams of the summit of the biblical mountain. The place where, according to legend, Noah's Ark stranded. Little Erhan Ceven once wants to take over his uncle's job as a mountain guide at Ararat. Whether the 12-year-old nomadic boy is up to the task depends on whether he manages the 5165 metres to the summit this year. From his perspective, the film tells the story of a mountain adventure that has cost the lives of more than 100 people to date. Erhan belongs to the Jelali tribe. For centuries the Kurdish nomads have been wandering with their sheep on the slopes of the biblical mountain along the borders to Armenia and Iran. The Turks call them the "Guardians of Ararat". Western expedition troops hired them for decades as porters and leaders in search of Noah's Ark. Among them Jim Irving, the "Moonwalker" and Apollo 15 astronaut. The ark legend brought jobs, bread for Erhan's whole clan. Then the civil war broke out. Kurdish guerrilla fighters of the PKK used the Ararat as a retreat. The Turkish military declared it a restricted zone. The mountain has only been accessible again since 2001. Even today mountaineers need a special permit from the military and the authorities in the capital Ankara. Only occasionally do they dare to climb the biblical mountain again. The nomads in particular are suffering as a result. Now they hope that things will get better again to give little Erhan and the other children a perspective on Ararat.
- The film leads into one of Turkey's most fascinating landscapes - the highlands of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, 150 kilometres southeast of Ankara. He accompanies the ecumenical patriarch Bartholomaios I on a journey to Mustafapasa, a former Greek rock town, and gives an insight into the everyday life of the Cappadocian shepherd Ali Sirli, who uses an old Byzantine cave church as a sheepfold. He is one of the last Cappadocians to inhabit a fairy fireplace in Uchisar and therefore has trouble with the authorities of his village Uchisar.
- The sabre-shaped peninsula resembles a gigantic powder keg at the eastern end of the world. 11 time zones lie between Moscow and the last outpost of the Russian giant empire. On the island between the Bering Sea in the west and the Sea of Okhotsk in the east, more than 160 volcanoes, countless geyser valleys and sulphur lakes on almost 370,000 square kilometres mark the visible framework for a phenomenon that geoscientists call the heart of the "Pacific Ring of Fire". Every year, tectonic forces push the Pacific Plate ten centimetres below the edge of Eurasia on a broad front. Daily earthquakes and volcanic eruptions shake the 1,200 kilometre long peninsula almost daily. Grey-yellow sulphur mud, poisonous vapours and black ash - it seethes in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Where the continental plate of Africa slides under the Eurasian one, volcanism developed. Little by little, mountains of fire rose from the sea and formed islands, which today lie like a seven star off the north coast of Sicily: Lipari, Vulcano, Stromboli, Salina, Panarea, Alicudi and Filicudi. Volcanism shapes the unique landscape of this Aeolian archipelago, fire mountains determine the life of the inhabitants. Some are mute and extinct, others still active like Stromboli or Vulcano. The first settlers arrived early, attracted by the fertile soil. Greeks and Romans lived on the Aeolian islands, traded worldwide with obsidian, the valuable volcanic glass rock. Today, geoscientists, archaeologists and biologists conduct research in this region on the edge of Europe.
- 2023– 53mTV Episode
- 1995–TV Episode
- 1995–TV EpisodeSaffron, the precious flower and spice of love, once gave it its name. For almost 700 years, the small Central Anatolian town of Safranbolu was the hub of the trade caravans on the Silk Road. Situated almost 200 kilometres north of the present-day Turkish capital of Ankara, Safranbolu was considered early by the Ottomans to be the "back garden of the Topkapi palace" along the Bosporus. Its inhabitants, Turks, Greeks and Jews, were famous for their craftsmanship. For centuries, blacksmiths, potters and tanners dominated the everyday scene. Many worked as bakers or saddlers at the Sultan's Court in Istanbul, some even rose to high government officers and, like the legendary Izzet Mehmet Pasha, became the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. This brought prosperity and the necessary resources for magnificent city villas. Two Grand Viziers donated mosques, provided infrastructure, urban planning and, with the construction of the first clock tower in the Ottoman Empire, also for the commemoration of a new era. The blessings of modernity, wide arterial roads, large commercial buildings and industrial complexes never reached the small town. It was simply forgotten. More than half a century later, it was realized that this preserved a unique jewel of original Anatolian urban culture. Since 1994, this urban jewel has been protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A late fortune that gave Safranbolu a second life as an "echo of the Oriental Middle Ages" in the midst of Turkish modernity.
- 1995–TV EpisodeHidden behind year-round blizzards and a month-long polar night, Wrangel Island lies just a few nautical miles from the Arctic pack ice limit. It is the last untouched natural paradise northwest of the Bering Strait. At winter temperatures as low as - 40 °C, more than 1000 polar bears, musk oxen and reindeer live alongside walrus colonies, seal families, arctic foxes, wolves and countless smaller endemic animal and plant species on a 7,608 km² Noah's Ark from the last ice age. Fossil finds prove that on Wrangel Island the mammoth grazed in the Arctic tundra until almost 3500 years ago. More recently, Russians, Britons, Canadians and Americans took turns occupying the island. Finally, on August 8, 1926, Soviet troops established the settlement "Ushakovskoe" on the south coast of the island, where almost 100 fishermen, seals and whalers lived until the end of the Soviet Union. Today the island serves as a base for a handful of gamekeepers of the "Wrangel Biosphere Reserve". It was not until the "Iron Curtain" lifted at the eastern end of the world that a few polar explorers, biologists and zoologists accompanied by Russians were allowed to visit the almost untouched paradise in the Chukshen Sea 600 km beyond the Arctic Circle. In 2004, UNESCO declared the area around Wrangel Island a World Heritage Site. Today the island is considered the last completely untouched biotope for polar bears, here they get their young and have no natural enemies. But the times in which the polar bar was only confronted with the challenges of its ecosystem are long gone. Global warming is making life difficult for the most powerful predator in the North and seriously threatening its habitat.
- 1995–TV EpisodeOne may be astonished to stand in front of the pyramids of Egypt and wonder how mortals could usually transport stone blocks weighing tons and stack them up to form Pharaonic tombs. But to turn an entire mountain peak into a tomb borders on foolhardiness and is unique in world history. On the southern flank of the Taurus Mountains, at 2,159 metres above sea level, buried under almost 200,000 cubic metres of scree and rock, archaeologists suspect the burial chamber of the legendary ruler who once brought the myths of the ancient Persian empires into harmony with the pantheon and lifestyle of the Greeks and Romans. Since the beginning of the exploration of the Ancient Orient, the monumental tomb of the self-proclaimed God King Antiochios I. Theos on the summit of Mount Nemrut near the provincial capital Adiyaman in today's southeast Turkey has been one of the wonders of the ancient world. Since 1987 the UNESCO leads the cult place on the mountain including surrounding countryside as world cultural heritage. Today, the tomb is an icon of all those mysteries of the past that have so far been able to elude their secrets from research. Dozens of stone sculptures up to 8 metres high on the two terraces below the artificially raised mountain top are considered by many to be the answer of the Near East to the stone idols of the Easter Islands. They are the last witnesses of the "Commagenic Kingdom", an enigmatic ruling dynasty that once emerged from the world empires of Alexander the Great and the Persian King Darius I and resisted the power and territorial claims of the Roman Caesars for generations.
- 1995–TV EpisodeTo the Buryats, the native people of Central Siberia, the "Baygal nuur" or the "rich lake", is a magical place, the cradle and soul of their people. The rest of the world simply sees Lake Baikal as a most magnificent body of water. Located in the heart of Siberia, on Russia's south-eastern border with Mongolia, it holds one fifth of all the liquid freshwater reserves on Earth. Baikal is the deepest and oldest lake in the world, its expanse of water covering a region larger than Belgium. To biologists, the Baikal region is the Galapagos archipelago of Russia, one of the most species-rich freshwater biotopes on our planet. When Russians speak of the "Osero Baikal", they mean the "great Siberian lake" which extends over a surface area of 31,722 km² at an altitude of 455 m between the south Siberian mountain ranges along Russia's south-eastern border with Mongolia. At 25 million years old and a depth of 1642 meters, it is both the oldest and the deepest lake on Earth, and stretches for 673 km from the south-west to the north-west, measuring 82 km at its widest point.
- 1995–TV EpisodeThe vast beech forests that have protected and nourished our ancestors from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, from Sicily to southern Sweden since the last Ice Age have almost disappeared. A single tree species once dominated large parts of the European continent. Beech trees are indestructible, almost resistant to any kind of climate change. Rain, snow, ice and even intense heat can do little harm to them. An intact beech forest is a closed ecosystem, a kind of superorganism that renews itself and creates habitat for many fellow inhabitants. Since 2011 UNESCO has listed the five German old forest stands "Grumsiner Forst" in Brandenburg, the "Kellerwald-Edersee National Park" in Hesse, the "Jasmund National Park" on Rügen, the "Serrahner Buchenwald" in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the "Hainich National Park" in Thuringia together with the Carpathian primeval forests of Slovakia and the Ukraine under the cumbersome designation "Buchenurwälder in den Karpaten und alte Buchenwälder in Deutschland" (beech primeval forests in the Carpathians and old beech forests in Germany) as a common world natural heritage site. This is nothing more - but also nothing less than a shaky insurance policy for a biological World Heritage Site as a puzzle building block for an intact environment of future generations. A kind of bet on the future of a gene database that will help to maintain the basis beyond economic efficiency and legislative periods that has ensured the survival of post-glacial people for the last 10,000 years. Preserving and protecting this heritage is a decision that requires foresight, but perhaps only "common sense".
- 1995–TV EpisodeUntil the end of 2002, one of the last European borders between Sicily and Hammerfest separates the "customs territory" of Hamburg's free port from the old town. Built in 1888 as the largest warehouse complex in the world, the Speicherstadt with its neighbouring "Chile House" has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since June 2015. The fact that at least the architectural substance of this ensemble, which is unique in the world, has been preserved, is ensured by the rigid requirements of the Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments and, since June 2015, the label "UNESCO World Cultural Heritage". The facades remain red, the roofs green, even at the first Speicherstadt Hotel, which opened in February 2014. One may call the scenery-strong evocation of a working world of yesterday success or, following the history of the Hanseatic merchant spirit, "fine profit".
- Germany in autumn 1977. "Urban guerrillas aim to destroy the state apparatus of domination - to destroy the myth of the omnipresence of the system and its inviolability." This was written by the so-called Red Army Faction RAF in their "Concept Urban Guerrilla". Seven years later the "omnipresence of the system" was not a myth, it had become a daily reality. Legislators and law enforcement authorities installed an apparatus that had previously been unimaginable: computer searches, the computer systems PIOS, Nadis, Inpol; more money, more posts, better equipment for police, constitutional protection and federal border guards; anti-terror laws, fortified courtrooms, high-security wings. The balance after seven years of fighting in the underground was alarming: 28 people died in attacks or gunfire, 17 members of the "urban guerilla" were killed. Two completely uninvolved persons had been accidentally shot by the police during investigations. 47 dead - 47 names - 47 fates: Jürgen Ponto, Siegfried Buback, Hanns-Martin Schleyer - Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin - In the end, the RAF had felt the "omnipresence of the system", against which it had originally been set up, at first hand - during the contact ban: guards, bars, concrete. The core of the RAF, which was located in Stuttgart-Stammheim, saw only one way out: death. They had divided the world: "Either pig or man. Either survive at all costs or fight to the death. Either problem or solution. There is nothing in between".
- 1996–1998TV EpisodeThe 2nd World War is over - the 1000 year old empire disintegrates after 12 years. On 8 May 1945 the world celebrates Germany's unconditional surrender. After breathing a sigh of relief about peace, a new struggle for survival follows. Hardly anyone can imagine today the indescribable misery, the extent of human suffering in the immediate post-war period. "The German", it was said, "does not hope. He starves and freezes. In the chaos of these years people think only of heating and food, of coal and potatoes. The food card becomes the most important document, but it only secures starvation rations. The black market becomes the dominant phenomenon of that time. It becomes clear that the Germans in East and West did not lose the same war. Currency reform and a social market economy are introduced in the West; the communist Soviet model is imposed in the East.