Absent from the screen since 1932, Pola Negri made the first of several comebacks in the German melodrama Mazurka. Negri is cast as a famous opera star, married to a powerful military officer. While hubby's off to war, she is forced to have "one too many" and ends up being raped by another man. When she becomes pregnant, it's the end of her marriage and her career. Fifteen years later, Negri comes face-to-face with the daughter she'd farmed out to adoption. Careful not to reveal her true identity, the chastened Negri tries to prevent her daughter from making a similar mistake with her virtue -- and with the same rascally lover who'd impregnated our heroine. When the caddish ex-lover refuses to back off, Negri takes drastic measures, setting the stage for a passion-tattering "Madame X"-style courtroom finale.

Tight drama allegedly based on a real event 'in a European city', as the opening credits tell us.
Prior to WWI, Pola Negri leaves a successful career as a Varieté singer to marry a cavalry officer and has a daughter with him. When he is called off to war, she accepts an invitation to a party at the home of a famous musician and former colleague who still carries quite a bit more than a torch for her. Too many drinks and a blackout later, she wakes in his bed and knows immediately what happened.
Her marriage is destroyed by this, divorce court awards the care of the daughter to the father, who returned from battle with only 1 arm, and the woman has to pick up her career to support herself. In every city, she searches the directory for the name of her ex-husband in an effort to locate her daughter. Once found, she pays a shy visit, but gives a somewhat false identity to the second wife of her ex-husband, who passed away several years earlier, but manages to get a brief glimpse of her daughter without revealing her identity. When she later sees her daughter leaving the theater she is performing in with the very man who raped her 20 years earlier, she grabs the trick shooter's gun and kills him.