- Many fundamental processes in nature, such as chemical reactions and phase transitions involve rearrangement of the constituent atoms. Such changes cannot be directly measured with visible light and occur transiently on time-scales comparable with the natural oscillation periods of atoms (femtoseconds to picoseconds). We present experiments on Ge-111 films irradiated with 100-fs 800-nm light pulses and probed by a time-delayed sub-ps x-ray pulse at 8 keV. After excitation of a dense electron-hole plasma within the 160-nm film, the ultrafast pathway of lattice disordering is measured as a function laser fluence. For close-to-threshold irradiation, inhomogeneous thermal melting, occurring via surface nucleation of the liquid phase and growth into the bulk determines the dynamics of the solid-to-liquid phase transition. For excitation at about twice the melting threshold, a nonthermal pathway, starting from a highly excited cold solid and relaxing into a hot liquid causes ultrafast melting. At long time delays, nearly perfect recrystallization of a (111) crystal is observed.