[1] Alfred ("Al"), an auto mechanic and Lisa ("Li"), a pediatric nurse, are a young married couple living in East Berlin during the summer of 1965.
Longing to escape the life-long drudgery his parents endured, he takes a short vacation, briefly rooms with his former motorcycle buddies, and finally moves in with his mother.
Al forms a close friendship with the 70-year-old Mogul, a volunteer with the local residential housing commission who is sympathetic to the youngster's personal difficulties.
[8] Böttcher offers a sympathetic portrayal of dissafected working-class youth at odds with the conformity demanded by post-Stalinist era officials in the GDR of the 1960s, “a tale of the yearning for a different life.”[9] Film critic Bernd Reinhardt writes: Al’s character is provocative particularly for the party functionaries.
It jars with the image of the ideal worker, always striving to fulfill work plans in ‘socialist competition’ and enthusiastically seeking to do even more after his working hours…Al is seen as "a deliberately detached, thoughtless and immature young man, who does his work but then spends his spare time unimaginatively and without any initiative..."[10]Born in ‘45 owes its stylistic elements to post-war Italian neorealism, “...heavily influenced by 1950s Italian neo-realists…”,[11] and conveying a “tender affection for adolescents, a feeling for the fragility of their emotions, such as one sometimes finds in the films of Vittorio De Sica [and] Luchino Visconti...”[12]