Die Leben der Elena Silber

A panorama of the 20th Century: five generations in Germany and Russia  

Russia, the beginning of the 20th Century.  Victor, a revolutionary, is executed in a small town east of Moscow. At that moment the times sweep up Victor's daughter Lena.  She marries a German textile engineer, Robert Silber, and follows him in 1936 to Berlin and Silesia, where they survive the Second World War.  But then, in the confusion of the postwar days, Robert disappears, and Lena has to raise her four daughters by herself. They are to continue on the path Lena has begun to follow out of her constricted life and away from misfortune and misery. But is the story, the way Lena tells it to her family, really true?  

In 2017, more than twenty years after Lena's death, her grandson, the young filmmaker Konstantin Stein, travels to Russia.  He wants to get to know and understand the history of the century and of his family, and thereby also understand himself.