Trace of Stones

There are very disorganized working conditions caused by incompetent officials, faulty plans, material deficits and delinquent behavior.

In one of the films' famous scenes, the Ballas skinny dip in the duck pond in a nearby town and a police officer instructs them to get out.

The Socialist Party (SED) sends a married secretary Werner Horrath to oversee the plant and tame Balla's delinquent actions.

Around the same time, Kati Klee (Krystyna Stypułkowska) arrives at the plant as an engineer who is first discouraged from working in an all-male environment.

The three characters develop a love triangle against the backdrop of Socialist Party politics and the pressure of completing the construction of the plant on time.

One of the main themes of the film is the problems that face the plant under socialist rule and how each character is affected by the Party's morals.

Initial screenings of the working print were attacked by high-ranking officials of the SED, much to the surprise of director Frank Beyer.

The SED, in an effort to create the illusion of studio autonomy, gave the film over to DEFA's internal approval process.

DEFA was first talked about during a meeting held after World War II within the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in January 1945.

In Trace of Stones, cultural officials demanded to that the duck pond scene be cut, is it was suggested, an underlying political agenda against the GDR state.

This type of censorship was common since DEFA was a state-funded and controlled film studio which had to abide by the demands of the government at that time.

[3] The Eleventh Plenum was decided during a meeting to discuss economic policy, but ended up restricting the liberal expression in culture, particularly in the film industry.

A lot of art created during this time was state supported and expressed issues that were considered frowned upon in film beforehand.

Additionally, he had military views that were controversial and the Culture Department declared that "an actor that could not be relied upon to support the proper standpoint on the defense of the GDR offscreen was clearly a rather poor candidate to play such a prominent political figure on it" and Krug ended up leaving East Germany for West Germany in 1976.