The underrecognized Kautner’s best-known film is this rugged, paranoiac noir set in the West German village of Sohnen around the site of an American airbase in progress, where a trucker and his former lover scramble to cover up both their affair and a bit of manslaughter.

One of the films that Robert Siodmak made upon returning to Germany in the mid-1950s, after his successful run in Hollywood, this visually striking Oscar-nominated thriller, based on the true story of Nazi-era serial killer Bruno Ludke, is also a sardonic indictment of political corruption.

In this politically resonant (and formerly banned) adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, a tyrannical, vain emperor demands that two travelers craft a new wardrobe for him that will inspire fear and servility among his subjects.

This tale of two lovers, finished by Aleksander Ford in the FRG after it was shelved by Polish censors, concerns a young man (Zbigniew Cybulski) and woman (Sonja Ziemann) who escape the city to share a few undisturbed hours in the countryside.

In this damning portrait of social disorder during and after the Nazi years, the body of an Wehrmacht officer who attempted desertion after having been ordered to execute women and children is discovered fifteen years after his disappearance.

One of the most significant films of fifties West German cinema, The Glass Tower stars Lilli Palmer as a tycoon’s wife who, no longer content to be one of her husband’s many possessions, turns to both adultery and her first love: the theater.

This hilarious satire of the FRG’s economic turnaround unexpectedly assumes the form of a kind of horror musical about a woman who receives help from a team of ghosts to deal with debt she has inherited from her castle-owning father.

In his sole directorial effort, Peter Lorre (who also co-wrote its screenplay) plays a Nazi-era scientist forced to commit murder after he is betrayed by his fiancée.

One of Kautner’s final films before his turn to television, about a German woman who, on the cusp of 40, flees to Venice and has an affair with an Englishman who harbors a secret, vengeful agenda, is also among his most personal and bitterly truthful.

A gothic synthesis of the heimatfilm and the horror movie, Roses Bloom on the Moorland is ripe for rediscovery, following the plight of a young village girl pressured by her family into spurning her childhood love and marrying a wealthy farmer.

One of Kautner’s signature films is this absorbing, almost-neorealist tale of lovers on the run about an East German factory worker and her unexpected romance with a compassionate West German cop.

After his long and prolific Hollywood career, Fritz Lang returned to Germany for an ambitious two-film project that would become known as his “Indian Epic.” In this, the first of the two, he tells the story of a German architect (Paul Hubschmid) who falls in the love with a Maharaja’s intended bride (Debra Paget).

A tense combination of military thriller and melodrama, directed by one of the most formally resourceful genre masters at DEFA, White Blood is a masterful reckoning with moral unease at the dawn of the nuclear age.