Thomas Büchel

When East Germany ceases to be separate from its western half, one would think that things would be better for the couple in this movie who have been plagued by sexual and political harassment of the most virulent kind, but , they are completely unprepared to cope with the swift changes that are transforming their familiar yet desperately unhappy world. In the story, Heinz is a laborer in the cooperative apple orchards of an East German village and has married his sweetheart Lena. She works to take care of the sickly wife of the co-op's manager and also must cope with the sexual attentions of the perfidious man. One day, after discovering this state of affairs, Heinz blows up and assaults his wife's harasser, which only serves to land him in jail. While in prison, the state secret police (the Stasi) get him to help them entrap the co-op manager, whom they believe is going to try to defect.

Ena lives on a remote farmstead. One stormy night, hydraulic engineer Sieghart appears at her door after his car gets stuck in the mud. Although Ena falls in love with Sieghart, she decides to marry her fiancé Mathias. She is incapabale of hiding her true feelings from her groom-to-be, and on the night before the wedding, Mathias forces the pair to join him for a carriage ride – with deadly results.

The film is set in 1989/1990 at a time when the "socialist" ideology underwent another major revolutionary collapse and the supposedly only progressive German "socialist", but walled-in GDR, joined the free West German society of the Federal Republic of Germany. In those days, the son of an East German teacher turns his back on the GDR because he is fed up with the eternal talk of the alleged superiority of "socialist" society and this "socialist" old day is nothing but dreariness and eternal gray everyday life for him. His mother, the convinced teacher and communist Christine Rautmann, suddenly realizes that her eternal propaganda of a golden socialist future is not falling on fertile ground with either her son or her pupils. She is suddenly faced with the ruins of her life as a teacher and mother. She herself becomes a seeker on a tremendously shaky social ground.