Auguste is an aging prostitute who falls in love with Felix, a younger student. While Felix has strayed away from his parents, Auguste starts taking care of him and spends her life savings into a cake shop to move further away from prostitution, but trouble comes when another woman enters the picture.

Else Riedel (Lissy Arna), locked out by her authoritarian father, seeks refuge with her boyfriend Hans. Complications threaten when Hans's roommate Max falls in love with her, but the situation is resolved: the three remain friends, and decide to form a music hall act. They want to ascend, but how? A way out beckons when a theatrical agent named Nevin enters Else’s life. He is played by Hubert von Meyerinck as a slick and oily villain, who oozes refinement; his experience behind bars is waved away with a silk scarf. He is cunning to the point of perfidiousness, but is not completely unsympathetic. He also embodies a new type - the scrounger.

Engineer Walter Fahr has constructed a massive passenger submarine, the 'Gloria'. The vessel undertakes a test journey with various esteemed invitees aboard, together with several animals, and the blind passenger Professor Keigo Sotuma. […] When those aboard the 'Gloria' return to the surface, they find a ship whose entire crew is dead. It is the astronomer Sotuma who figures out what has happened: during their undersea journey, the Earth was scorched by the tail of a comet, and all life extinguished. The 'Gloria' sails back to shore, carrying the final humans into a dead world…