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In pre-War Potsdam the state school for officers' daughters receives sensitive, 14-year-old Manuela von Meinhardis (Hertha Thiele). The principal (Emilia Onda) tries to turn out steel women to match Prussia's iron men by bundling the little girls in heavy uniforms, marching them in columns up & down long winding stairs, starving, shadowing, suppressing them. At night they weep for loneliness; they exploit any teacher's kindness into a schoolgirl "crush"; on a rare party they go half-mad with sudden unrestraint. Manuela, after a play in which she has starred, drinks several glasses of the school punch, staggers to the platform and announces that she loves a particular teacher, that the Fraulein (Dorothea Wieck) has given her a chemise. Of this the principal makes such a scandal that the child goes to kill herself by jumping from the top of the staircase well. The other children drag her back in time. The final scene, in which the overwrought children gather around the young Fraulein, is made the symbol of the harsh old principal's spiritual defeat, the prediction of old Germanv's death.