East Germany, 1980. Barbara Wolff is a young doctor who has applied for an exit visa from the GDR and, as punishment, has been transferred from her prestigious post in Berlin to a small pediatric hospital in the country. She must weigh her absolute dedication to her patients against a potential escape to the West, and her newfound attraction to a doctor in whom she sees a kindred spirit.

Heinrich Faust desires enlightenment. He seeks to understand the very nature of life and how the world goes round. Driven by his thirst for knowledge, he unearths corpses and rummages in their guts in search of the soul. He soon meets the racketeer Mauricius, who takes him to the twilight zones of their small town. In a bath house, his attention is caught by the young Margarete, also known as "Gretchen". Later, the two new friends are entangled in...

The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin seen through the eyes of a 12-year old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher.