This article will analyse the representation of young single motherhood in the German films Lucy by Henner Winckler (2006) and Breaking Horizons by Pola Schirin Beck (2012). Based on E. Ann Kaplan’s book Motherhood and Representation (Kaplan, 1992), in which she analyses American mainstream film and media from the early twentieth century up to the 1980s, the mother’s representation in the German films will be studied in relation to work and sexuality. Kaplan mentions six maternal discourses that evolved from the 1980s onwards in American media, including the categories of the self-fulfilled mother, the abusive mother, the woman-who-refuses-to-mother, the absent mother, the working mother as well as the lesbian mother. The German discourse of non-traditional motherhood, however, deviates from this and is in need of a different categorisation. This article will account a German filmic national context that is missing in the US-centric analysis of Kaplan and maternal film scholarship in general. It will, therefore, analyse the representation of young single motherhood in German film as an addition to Kaplan’s originally American maternal categorisation.