Berlin in 1878: Corinna Schmidt, who was brought up in a petit-bourgeois, academic family, is romantically interested in Leopold Treibel, the son of the lordly councillor of commerce Jenny Treibel – although Corinna is also deeply in love with her cousin Marcel. Leopold is also falling for cute Corinna, and Jenny Treibel tries to prevent their friendship by all means, but changes her opinion when their secret engagement becomes public. To avoid a scandal, she urges them to marry quickly. But Corinna soon withdraws from this complicated situation and again turns to her cousin, who is banished from the country for his social democratic beliefs.
The poor, lower-class girl Eliza Dolittle sells flowers at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral to passers-by. Her plain jargon, her headstrong way of expressing herself, fascinates the briefly passing-by language researcher and phonetics teacher professor Higgins. He meets a good acquaintance, colonel Pickering, who is also interested in science, and makes a wager with him: Higgins bets that he can accomplish that, within just six months, he can turn the squalid girl with grubby looks into a gentle lady of the London society with splendid manners and a likewise pronunciation. Eliza may not know what’s coming for her, but after some persuasiveness, she agrees to move into the fine house of the professor.
A feature-length jewish joke: The heavily indebted Sami Bambus fakes his death, so that his debts are taken over by the greedy heirs, led by the scrounger Prellstein. The putative heir also brings speculators to the scene, and the general confusion can ultimately only be reconciled by the summoned uncle Salomon and by Samis' return from the dead.
In "Menschen Untereinander" ("The Folk Upstairs"), director Gerhard Lamprecht sketches a cross-section of Germany's new post-war society, with its winners, social climbers, and losers, represented by the social microcosm of an apartment building. The gossip-mad Frau Mierig (Lydia Potechina) from the rear building gives the newly-arrived Frau Kaminski (Käthe Haack), the janitor's wife, a lively initiation into the tenants and their peculiarities.
The husband of Countess Manon Moreau is found murdered. André Rabatin, who belongs to the same club as Count Moreau, is the suspect. Rabatin, a old-school gentleman, affirms his innocence to the widow and claims that the death of the count must have been a tragic accident. Manon believes Rabatin and begins to fall in love with him. But Rabatin himself suspects that she has murdered her husband.
A Man's Girlhood examines in comic form the conundrums of intersexuality. Depicts the memories of the author, published in 1907 as an anonymous biography under the pseudonym NOBody, but was, following the taste of the time, dramatically oversubscribed. A child born without a clear gender is raised by the father as a boy, later by the uncle as a girl and dissected after death.