A few days after the GDR built the Berlin Wall, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer commented that this was “an infamous and brutal act against our brothers and sisters in the Zone.” Director Walter Heynowski digs into this ubiquitous West German expression, using footage from West German news
In the summer of 1945, Dresden factory workers send their colleague Kalle (Erwin Geschonneck) hundreds of miles north to pick up supplies. His attempts to travel through the Soviet occupation zone become a hilarious odyssey full of high jinks and misadventures.
This two-part epic traces the development of a manor and farm in Mecklenburg, from the flight of its aristocratic landowners before the advancing Soviet troops in 1945, to just after the East German uprising of June 17, 1953, by which time it has become an agricultural cooperative.
At the end of WWII, Alfons lives with his grandparents on a farm in a Silesian village. He adores his grandmother (Carmen-Maja Antoni), who runs everything after her husband dies. But everything changes after a travelling showman (Fritz Marquardt) arrives in the xenophobic village.
Christine is a young farm worker in a small village in post-war Germany. Her attempts to improve her situation through further education are hampered by frequent pregnancies arising from ill-fated relationships.
Ruth Bodenheim returns to West Germany a broken woman from the war. As a seventeen-year-old Jewish woman, the Nazis sent her to a brothel in Poland and her parents to a concentration camp. Her former fiancée, Dr. Martin, marries her when she returns, and his love and patience help her heal.
This DVD compilation chronicles the year 1948 through film.
After years in Soviet captivity, farmer Heinz Weimann returns to the village of Bärenweiler, in West Germany. His joy at returning home is clouded by news that US occupation forces intend to build an airfield on village lands, in preparation for a confrontation with the Soviet Union.
This short documentary calls for compliance with labor protection laws during rubble clearance and reconstruction work. A construction site on Wernerstraße in Berlin is used to to concretely illustrate the positive effects of these laws.
The chemist Dr. Hans Scholz lives through a tortuous political transformation and maturation process. Eventually, he adopts political neutrality and closes his eyes to the fact that the poison being produced in his factory is being used in the extermination camps.