"[4] Politicians and the military intervene, set up quarantine stations and develop a vaccine, which carries high risks.
[1][9] A conversation with Luis Buñuel's screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière brought Fleischmann to the film concept years before.
[3] The initial idea was that in Athens, scientists put an artificial, deadly virus on the pillars of the Acropolis to solve the problem of overpopulation.
[5] Hans C. Blumenberg wrote in 1979 in Die Zeit: "The Hamburg Syndrome by Peter Fleischmann is a chaotic film about chaotic conditions, considerably more appealing, unusual and intelligent than the many reviews suggest,"[11] and "Fleischmann's staging is as eccentric as the cast of this apocalyptic farce between the Reeperbahn and the Almhütte: a series of violent style breaks, without regard to aesthetic losses.
"[11] Hellmuth Karasek wrote in 1979 in Der Spiegel: "The marginal figures show that Fleischmann wanted to oppose the lacquered and embellished New German reality with a kind of Buñuel world of the sick, ailing and outcasts.
(Prädikat wertvoll)"[13] Filmfest Hamburg 2019: "Trashy, with a great cast and a soundtrack from the young Jean-Michel Jarre: this cultish Utopian end-times drama has been comprehensively restored to mark the 40th anniversary of its original release.