The engineer Georg de la Croix ( Herr Alfred Abel ) suffers a nervous breakdown due to the continuous unfaithfulness of his lover, Dame Sappho ( Dame Pola Negri ). Georg ends up in a lunatic asylum. His brother, Richard ( Herr Johannes Riemann ) wants to avenge him but instead falls in love with the beautiful Dame Sappho. When Herr Richard finds out from a previous lover of Dame Sappho that she was the cause of his brother's insanity, Richard decides to put an end to his affair with her by marrying someone else but he still must see Dame Sappho, even minutes after the wedding.

Der Gelbe Schein was shot at the end of WW I in a partly Jewish neighbourhood in Warsaw, the so called Nalevsky-Quarters. Poland still was occupied by German troops at that time. Parts of the movie were filmed at the Ufa-Union-Ateliers in Berlin Tempelhof though.
Der Gelbe Schein was planned as propagandistic movie against the Russian Empire of the Czar. But it premiered not before the 22nd of November 1918 when the empire had collapsed already. Today Der Gelbe Schein is an early example of a movie featuring a studied woman as heroine while being in the same time the spectacular case of a German Propaganda-Film with a philosemitistic message.

A European countess, after being betrayed by her lover, goes to live in small town Middle America with her cousins and causes havoc among the rather puritanical community members.