Elisabeth (Kristina Söderbaum) falls in love with Reinhardt (Carl Raddatz), but he leaves their native village to study music, travel the world and build his career as a composer.

[4] Immensee was shot primarily in Holstein, on alternating days with Opfergang, to save money on colour production; Harlan's previous film, Die goldene Stadt, had been very expensive.

Originally he proposed to shoot three films simultaneously using the same principals and mostly the same locations and sets, but the third, Pole Poppenspäler, another novella by Storm, was dropped.

[13] Joseph Goebbels was so pleased with Die goldene Stadt that he did not interfere with the production of Immensee, and Harlan wrote in 1974: "Of all the films that I made during the war, this was the only one which remained true to the original scenarios and was distributed just as I had foreseen.

[15] Immensee was highly successful, making a profit of 4,305,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ on an investment of 2,059,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁;[14] it made 800,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ in its first month and with a longer run, would likely have overtaken Die goldene Stadt as the all-time leading moneymaker among German films.

[14] At a time when German forces were greatly concerned about the fidelity of their womenfolk left at home, the film was "one of the most important cinematic contributions to front-line morale".

"[18][19] Klaus Jebens, who had been a young soldier in 1943, remembered the film so fondly that in 1975 he bought the estate on Lake Plön where shooting had taken place, and was still living there twenty years later.

"[21] In an assessment of Söderbaum's career following her death, a reviewer judged Immensee to be probably her finest work, providing "the indispensable grain of believability and grounding" for Harlan's "excessive filmic phantasies" and the unmoving centre holding the film together against the "centrifugal forces" set up by the externalisation of the novella's internal narrative, with the Roman scenes and their "explicitly stated association between Italian architecture and German music" pulling the focus away from the Holstein setting.

convey[ing] a strong feeling for nature and a fervent idyllic mood";[23] David Stewart Hull, in his 1969 survey of Film in the Third Reich, said it was "still successful.

"[27] Antje Ascheid finds Elisabeth "an unremarkable and dull character" and sums up the film as "[speaking] to contemporary audiences by reflecting a mood of resignation and depression", its "ideological fatalism" an increasingly common response in Nazi culture to the worsening wartime situation.