[4] After the war the wages of the players in her father's orchestra were halved, and in order to support the family budget Ula's mother, born Katharina Kreis, took factory work in the textiles sector.
[6] Katharina Stöckl-Kreis had grown up in an orphanage, looked after by nuns who had solicitously educated her in a formidable range of house-wifely skills, and brought a steely practicality to the challenges of raising a family on her own during the war years.
[6] Their home and the surrounding area were destroyed on 17 December 1944: collateral damage included three dead siblings, but both her parents had survived.
[6] Stöckl quit school in 1954 and trained for secretarial work,[7] which would remain her principal source of paid employment till 1963.
[6] Between May and August 1963 she worked as an editorial assistant with the publishers DM-Verlag at Sandweier (at that time still just outside Baden-Baden, into which the little town has subsequently been subsumed).
It failed to go on general release when first produced due to the insolvency of the selected distributor, but subsequent critics and film scholars have nevertheless born witness to its enduring significance.
[7] The next year she teamed up with Edgar Reitz to produce "die Geschichten vom Kübelkind" (loosely, "Tales of the Dumpster Kid"), a film of 22 episodes from the life of a girl who does not conform to the norms of civil society.
Reitz described it as the story of a "perverse polymorph, an infantile monstrous person",[a] but it also gave an insight into how such a combination of characteristics might be instilled by a deeply challenging succession of childhood experiences.
[15] Originally intended for showing in experimental cinemas and, according to at least one source, in pubs, starting in 1971 sections of it began to find their way onto television, thereby garnering a larger more mainstream audience and establishing more broadly the public reputations of its two co-producers.