Wilhelm Grasshoff

Ruth is the wife of Erich Halbfass, a well-heeled corsetry manufacturer. Business is booming, Erich splashes around in the house swimming pool and daughter Aglaia attends school well. The bored middle-class wife begins a secret affair with Aglaia's drawing teacher Franz Vogelsang, setting murder and manslaughter in motion.

A divorced woman in her thirties fights a losing battle in Munich to attain belated self-fulfillment. The die is cast in a briskly impersonal society geared to male dominance and early training for career women.

Baal explores the cult of the genius, an antiheroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.

An intriguing Hans Christian Andersen-style fairy tale aesthetic and voice-over narration. Sudden Wealth is a despairing chronicle of a group of starving peasants who finally seize governmental wealth like a dysfunctional group of Robin Hood's Merry Men, only to be betrayed by their inescapable selves and systematically dehumanized (think bucolic Orwell) and reprogrammed by what we'll put under the rubric of God and Country.