Heinz, an ambitious reporter of the Berlin am Morgen newspaper, had made a fatal error when he prepared an article about a locomotive's factory, confusing the successful and motivated Schneider Workers' Brigade with the negligent Schindler Brigade.
Heinz's editor, Christine, decides to send him to the factory on another mission, and this time he should mingle with workers by joining them.
Heinz, who takes the new assignment with little enthusiasm, becomes a highly motivated laborer and even manages to influence the Brigades' members to stop quarrelling.
Before the Lightning Strikes was part of a wave of light-hearted comedies released in the late 1950s to provide entertainment for the viewers, after the DEFA Board noticed the public's negative response to the ideological films made earlier in the decade.
[3] It was the third in a series of four comedies made in collaboration between director Richard Groschopp and writers Lothar Creutz and Carl Andriessen, who also worked on Sie kannten sich alle (1958) Ware für Katalonien (1959) and Die Liebe und der Co-Pilot (1960).