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Martin Berger’s 'Menschen' serves as a harrowing socio-cinematic autopsy of the human spirit, adrift in the wreckage of a post-war landscape. Far from the escapist fantasies that often dominated early Weimar screens, this 1921 opus delves into the penumbral existence of the disenfranchised. The narrative follows a fatalistic trajectory, where the characters—portrayed with a raw, almost primitive intensity—grapple with the crushing weight of systemic indifference and personal moral decay.
A working-class couple with four children live in extreme poverty in a rear building. When the woman becomes pregnant again, she goes to a young doctor and asks him to terminate the pregnancy, as the child would be too much of a burden for her. The doctor refuses to perform the procedure because it is against the law, so she has the abortion herself and dies in the process. The public prosecutor has the man arrested and the four children are left to fend for themselves. The prosecutor's fiancée, a young teacher, lives in the front building. When she is raped and becomes pregnant in her apartment by the porter's wife's mentally disturbed son, the doctor, deeply affected by the case of the working-class couple, performs an illegal abortion on the teacher and confronts the public prosecutor with the case of his own fiancée. The public prosecutor resigns because he can no longer reconcile his office with his conscience.
The film tells the story of Ivan Mazeppa, a Ukrainian page at the Polish court who has an affair with the young wife of a much older count. Outraged when he learns of the incident, the nobleman has Mazeppa tied naked to a wild horse which is then released into the wilderness. The bulk of the poem describes the long hazardous journey during which Mazeppa almost dies twice but ultimately survives and returns to his native Ukraine.
The wealthy Frenchman Raoul lives with his mother and his cousin Therese in a magnificent villa on the Riviera. Therese is deeply in love with her relative, but he seems to reciprocate only "brotherly" affection. One day, a visitor arrives: the lustful Lydia, a friend of Therese's, known as a man-eating and amoral woman. It isn't long before Raoul, the master of the house, falls completely under the spell of the blonde siren from abroad, and the two become engaged and eventually married.
Portrays the deep intrigue and mystical fanaticism of the last days of the Romanoffs, when Rasputin, the mad monk had such a hold over them.
A wealthy skirt-chasing drunkard marries a simple country gal, yet he doesn't take time off from his regular 'affairs'.
Prim professor Immanuel Rath finds some of his students ogling racy photos of cabaret performer Lola Lola and visits a local club, The Blue Angel, in an attempt to catch them there. Seeing Lola perform, the teacher is filled with lust, eventually resigning his position at the school to marry the young woman. However, his marriage to a coquette -- whose job is to entice men -- proves to be more difficult than Rath imagined.