It was one of the cycle of Rubble films made in the wake of Germany's defeat during World War II.

The film addresses issues of collective guilt during the Nazi era, using the device of a car built in 1933 and dismantled in 1947 narrating the various experiences of its owners in a series of seven separate episodes.

[1] The director, Helmut Käutner, had several of his earlier films banned by the Nazis which led to him being perceived as possessing greater moral authority than many of his colleagues.

In the 1960s the film began to attract criticism for allegedly whitewashing ordinary Germans' acceptance of Nazi ideology.

However, this criticism has in turn been challenged as being ahistorical and ignoring the conditions under which it was made - such as the constraints put on German film-makers by the Allied occupation powers and the aversion of contemporary German audiences to films that explicitly examined their possible collective guilt.