Two men fall in love with Lotte: the director Beier, a former SS man who tries to compensate for his past with hard work, and the Soviet engineer Sergei, whose wife was murdered by the Germans in the war.
The script was inspired by the real conditions of Wismut: thousands of prostitutes were arrested and forced to work in the mines during the late 1940s, while many other miners were former servicemen of the Wehrmacht, the SS or ex-members of the Nazi Party.
[1] The film was intended to be ready for release already in 1958, but the DEFA Commission and functionaries in the Ministry of Culture disapproved of the negative portrayal of party boss Weihrauch and the less than pristine conduct of the workers.
While the exact details of the request are unknown, the Soviets were worried that presenting a Uranium mine and its contribution to the nuclear arms race - in the film, the main motivation of the miners was to insure peace by breaking the American monopoly on atomic weapons - would undermine their position in the diplomatic struggle against the West.
[2] Seán Allan and John Sandford wrote that the film imported a "gold rush town" into East Germany, and was in many ways reminiscent of classical Westerners, including "the saloon-fight scenes.
While the sun alternatively served as an allegory to the Uranium in the earth or to the workers' own elusive personal happiness, Brockmann stated that above all it symbolized the promised, Utopian society which communism sought to establish, and for which the miners had to toil hard in the conditions of first post-war years.