Hans in allen Gassen (1930)

Hans Steindecker lives up to his reputation as a man who is everywhere at once: he is the very embodiment of the fast-moving reporter. Wherever something is happening, Hans is already there, reporting on it in his newspaper, the M.Z. This time he has landed in Geneva, where the League of Nations is in session. That alone would not necessarily be enough to make Hans eager to report—but a murder he witnesses personally certainly is. At any rate, a shot rings out from offscreen in front of everyone, and the victim is an important delegate. Hans discovers a camera fitted with a firing mechanism. But Steindecker’s reports never arrive; suddenly, the fast-moving reporter has vanished without a trace. The M.Z.’s editor-in-chief then sends his editor Elfenstock to Geneva in the company plane, first to find out what is going on and second to look for Hans Steindecker. Hardly has Elfenstock stepped off the plane when a striking young woman named Nelly rushes up to him as he suffers from air sickness and presses a key into his hand. Then the mysterious young woman disappears in the newspaper’s plane as quickly as she had appeared. The key belongs to a hotel, and Elfenstock immediately takes a taxi there. The porter shows the editor to the hotel room corresponding to the key. The connecting door to the neighboring room creaks and finally opens: the missing colleague is standing in the doorway. Steindecker is thoroughly annoyed to find his Berlin colleague instead of a woman—he had been looking forward to a romantic encounter with Nelly, who had just flown off. In his disappointment, he angrily dunks Elfenstock into the bathwater he had just run. Steindecker is actually engaged to Elisabeth, his sensible, blonde, and somewhat dull secretary. But the mysterious Nelly, who has slipped away, has caught his fancy. Hans is quite sure she must have something to do with the murder, especially since she had begged him to drive her across the border as quickly as possible. Steindecker immediately wires Berlin, telling them to detain the dark-haired woman as soon as she arrives home on the newspaper plane. At last, in Nice, where Nelly has gone to be with her husband, a certain Soranzo, Hans uncovers the real circumstances behind the murder. They are not political at all, but personal: simply a case of ordinary jealousy. Nelly had fired the fatal shot. Steindecker has proved himself a clever detective-reporter and will put the dark wildcat who, as he puts it, “scratched in Geneva” out of his mind and return to his sensible Elisabeth.