The likeable and carefree Grand Duke of Abacco is in dire straits. There is no money left to service the State's debt; the main creditor is looking forward to expropriating the entire Duchy. The marriage with Olga, Grand Duchess of Russia, would solve everything, but a crucial letter of hers about the engagement has been stolen. Besides, a bunch of revolutionaries and a dubious businessman have other plans regarding the Grand Duke. With the intrusion of adventurer Philipp Collins into the Grand Duke's affairs, a series of frantic chases, plots and counter-plots begins...

Madame Talandier is a divorcee living the high life in Paris. Her current lover is the overweight Percy Talandier but then she meets Count Lerski and sets her sights on him. Then she hears from her ex-husband that Lerski he is not a count, he works as a waiter.

The Venetian merchant Antonio is in a difficult financial situation. To help his friend Bassanio, who is campaigning for the heiress Portia, he goes, although in mutual disgust, to the Jewish money lender Shylock to borrow money from him. If Antonio can not repay the debt Shylock is allowed to cut a pound of meat out of Antonio's body. That is the deal.

The Ethiopian King offers his daughter to a powerful Pharaoh to secure peace between the two countries.

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.

The circus dancer Lulu is a thoroughly q liberal being. Although she loves her former savior, the clown Alfredo, she begins a relationship with the noble Henri von Reithofen. Henri kills himself ruined by the horrendous expenses for Lulu.