[5] The film purports to show improvements made in East Germany in the late 1940s, including land reform and steel industry developments, the founding of the Socialist Unity Party, the expropriation of war criminals and the first Five-year plan.

Western Germany is depicted as being plagued by unemployment (with over 2 million people out of work), child labour, and female student prostitution.

[3] According to John Davidson and Sabne Hake, authors of Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, "the film describes the most important stations of the young GDR as a 'chronicle of ascension', to quote the working title".

By contrast, "the representation of West Germany aims to place the FRG in line with National Socialism, and in that tradition, as a vassal of the Western powers and a servant of imperialist politics, respectively".

In the film, prominent Nazis are shown at the Nuremberg trials, and a voiceover states that their work is being continued by the likes of Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher, Winston Churchill, and Harry Truman.