This 2-DVD set includes seven documentaries covering cultural, economic, and political developments from the founding of the GDR in 1949, to German unification on October 3, 1990.
After 1945, land reform forces Old Kraske to become an agricultural worker, but he continues to work on his own, flatly refusing to join any collective farming activities. He desperately wants a large-scale farm like Kimpel's in order to pass it on to his adored grandson, Tinko.
Even the military academy can't stop kind-hearted officer Gottfried Engelhardt from seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Everything in the young GDR is blooming: Engelhardt's career, the socialist state, the black market, and maybe even a chance at love.
A five-year-old girl suddenly appears on the doorstep of a well-to-do Hamburg family. The different members of the multi-generational, white household have different reactions to the arrival of Toxi, who is black, the daughter of an African-American G.I. and a German woman who has died.
In 1955 Michael Vierkant, a Jew who emigrated during the Nazi-era, returns to the BRD to obtain the judgment of the former denouncer Korn, who was responsible for the murder of his sister.
In the early 1950s, frequent power outages hurt production in the GDR. Using an innovative method from the USSR, workers at the Zschornewitz atomic power plant in Saxony-Anhalt are able to quickly repair a turbine and prevent a long delay in energy output.
A WWII bombing run strikes a small Germany town, including the temporary hospital in which two women have just given birth.