Director Uwe Belz focuses his attention on viewing Karl Marx from an alternative perspective, showing the emotional and romantic sides of the historical figure. Passages from LOVE LETTERS that Marx and his fiancée, Jenny von Westphalen, exchanged as teenagers blend with paintings and beautifully atmospheric photographs of places connected to Marx. The letters and poems are read by well-known East German actors, such as Jenny Gröllmann and Dieter...

Diana Groó’s documentary tells the story of Regina Jonas (1902-1944) a strong woman, who made history by becoming the first properly ordained woman rabbi in the world.The daughter of an Orthodox Jewish peddler, Jonas grew up in Berlin’s slum, studied at the liberal Hochschulefür die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Scientific Study of Judaism) beginning in 1924,and was ordained in 1935. At age 37, she met the love of her life, Rabbi...

This film documents a vital moment in the re-building of a city center, where the Berlin wall once stood. Within a few years Pariser Platz was rebuilt, accompanied by an extensive public debate about the quality of the new architecture and the merits of the city planning for the area. An imposing assembly of internationally acclaimed architects found new solutions for the ten buildings that once defined the site, among them the American embassy. Featured...

In HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, tracing the contours of the major historical uphevals that afflicted Germany in the 20th century. Uncovering journal entries, photographs and contemporary footage, Heise creates a poetic meditation on individual and collective history.

While Germany sits as one of the major democratic models, an ex-prisoner of the Stasi delivers from his former cell a frightening testimony that questions the sustainability of our contemporary democracies. 

Plunge into German's grammatical case system, covering the nominative and accusative cases, which correspond to the subject and direct object. View a declension table of nominative and accusative endings for articles, and practice them in a tour of a typical house, learning household words. And discover how to negate a noun phrase with kein, and the supreme utility of the expression, es gibt.

Dig deeper into the subjunctive by learning to express hypotheticals in the past tense. The dialogue takes you through eastern Germany via the famous Autobahn: first to Wittenberg, site of Martin Luther's historic challenge to the Catholic Church, and then on to Berlin, where you survey some of the many monuments and museums, including sites commemorating the Berlin Wall and the Holocaust.

Wie viel Uhr ist es? (What time is it?) Learn to tell time and how to read a railway timetable. Rehearse using the prepositions um, von, and bis in a temporal context. Also discover that German has three distinct words that cover our English term, "time." Then dive into possessive pronouns—in singular and plural, as well as nominative and accusative—picking up new vocabulary along the way.

Delve into the checkered past of Professor Pfrehm as you learn about the simple past. This tense is different in form from the present perfect you learned earlier, but its meaning is the same, though it is mostly used in formal writing. Cover the simple past forms of the verbs sein, haben, and geben, and the modal verbs müssen, können, mögen, dürfen, wollen, and sollen.

Practice your first joke in German. Then meet the fourth and final German case (the genitive), completing your study of the case system. See how von + a dative construction performs the same function as the genitive. Then turn to prepositions that take the genitive, such as wegen and laut. Finally, plunge into the passive voice, learning how to turn the object of a sentence into the subject.