After Jochen saves police officer Erich's life, the two men become close friends and Erich helps Jochen get a job working for Berlin's local train system.
Engineer Tom Breitsprecher, who has always been more interested in women than political engagement, reluctantly agrees to supervise a team of young FDJ volunteers who are building a new industrial complex.
In a small town, everyone has tried to forget what happened shortly after WWII. That is, until a stranger finds a book that Jadup gave to the young refugee, Boel, over 30 years ago. Painful memories of the period after the war and of Boel and her sudden disappearance begin to surface.
World-famous geneticist Professor Hülsenbeck (Norbert Christian) is a man of integrity who refuses to mix science and political gain. Because his findings are being used to harm humanity, he imigrates to the United States in 1933 in protest against Nazi racial politics.
This harsh, yet poetic critique of Stalinism in East Germany centers on the mythical village of Stalina in 1953. The villagers legitimize injustice by glorifying “real existing socialism” … at the same time as they experience their own destruction by the system. .
A new world full of excitement and temptation opens up for 18-year-old Erika (Doris Abeßer) when her father flees from Krüselin, a small village in Brandenburg, to West Berlin, taking his daughter with him.
Documentary footage is intercut at a breathless pace to tell the story of Berlin’s reconstruction post-WWII from the East German perspective.
Carpenter Tillmann Rutenschneider has been on the road for years, but in 1932, he finally arrives back in his home village with a foreign wife. The couple build a home together and start a family, but it isn't long before they fall victim to the new Race Laws.
Martha Bieder, born in 1910 in Berlin, is the last rubble-woman in Rummelsburg.
Only two years after WWII, the small village of Bötzow in Brandenburg is struggling to rebuild and the vacuum of social order has allowed a gang of youth to impose their own reign of terror over the town.