An innovative approach to the subject of National Socialism which uses a composition by Georg Katzer, a GDR pioneer of Neue Musik. The sound level – acoustic distortions and sound bites by leading representatives of the Third Reich – dominates, juxtaposed with minimalist images. A dialogue between viewers and memorial evolves in shots and counter shots.

Silvia Szuprizinski has lived alone with her little daughter for a year now: time to take stock. The young woman talks, her stories commented by Gabriele Hochneder’s pictures of everyday life that tell of efforts. Silvia, leaning against the tiled stove, talks about the failed relationship with the child’s father with detachment, but also with a certain degree of regret. At least her own family are present, all of them at the door in time for the first birthday. Still, Silvia spends her nights alone with herself – and the television. The fact that Hochneder’s film, despite the adversities, does not become a lament is at least partly owing to its sanguine main protagonist.

This pointed montage of contrasts recalls the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, authorised by US President Harry S. Truman, and the devastating consequences: images of Harry in a warm embrace with a girl, images of wounded children in Japan. In September 1945, the island state in the Far East surrendered and the Second World War was officially over.

After the Wehrmacht invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Jewish population was disenfranchised and killed, as this etude, staged at the Terezín Memorial, recalls. The fact that there was successful Jewish resistance even in extermination camps like Sobibór did not fit in with the traditional image of the passive victims that is melodramatically re-enforced by this film.

The well-known illustrator Werner Klemke uses his drawings to teach the youngest bookworms about the value of reading. Taking this as a starting point, Lotte Thiel presents the GDR as a land of books whose capital is Leipzig. Figures and images from the 1971 International Book Art Exhibition underscore the significance accorded to books as a tool for shaping the “socialist personality”.

Pointedly sober and factual, the speaker explains the necessary preparations for the last departure of an express steam train headed for Berlin from Leipzig Central Station on 30 September 1978. Numerous amateur filmmakers and photographers accompany the steam engine as it departs on its final mission. Unlike the speaker, they were probably quite moved.

Commissioned by the German Book Traders’ Association, Lotte Thiel follows the preparations for the 1971 International Book Art Exhibition, prominently supported on screen and on the soundtrack. The tradition of this fair is recalled, from its predecessor BUGRA 1914 to the first IBA in 1927 and the subsequent events that took place every five to six years starting in 1959. Award-winning illustrations can be viewed in detail.

“If you want to storm, you use stormer methods”, to quote a direct reference to the infamous anti-Semitic smear sheet of the Nazi era. Set to shrill trumpet sounds, this outraged film pamphlet dissects, or so it seems, the drastic jargon of the “West German monopoly press”, especially the publications of the Springer publishing house, in their coverage of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. At the same time, it uses the reviled style for its own argumentation. Under the auspices of the DEFA newsreel editors of “Der Augenzeuge” (The Eyewitness), a sweeping blow against the Bonn Republic arises from news images and superimposed newspaper articles.

A representative of the Volgograd Section of the German-Soviet Friendship Society recalls German “comrades who fought against Hitler here […] and at other front sectors.” Equalisation with the people in the Soviet Union is completed at the Mamayev Kurgan memorial: The (German) visitors merge with the survivors who mourn their fallen.

A male voice, accompanied by the eponymous instrumental piece by Reinhard Lakomy, comments on photographic and material evidence of the events on the grounds of the Langenstein-Zwieberge subcamp. The audiovisual tour concludes with a visit by an FDJ (Free German Youth) group who lay down wreaths at the memorial site built in 1949. The speaker unequivocally classes this ritual of remembrance as part of the raison d’état.

The married couple Angelika and Horst Butter sum up successes and setbacks of their joint amateur filmmaking. They now produce elaborate puppet animations in their private rooms, under sometimes adverse conditions. They adapt fairy tale and fantasy sources, but also take up topical social issues, for example in an entertaining vision for International Women’s Day.

East Berlin plays host to the world at the 10th World Youth Festival. The secret capital of the GDR, Leipzig, also gets some reflected glory. On 3 August 1973, festival delegations from forty countries take a special train to the trade fair city. Between the official events there is room for ambiguous side glances, captured in this report of the day made by several Leipzig company and amateur film groups.

High up north, in the Stralsund People’s Dockyard, Gitta Nickel encounters a youth brigade whose members speak frankly: “I’m 27 now. Judging from my own example I can say: it’s been nothing but work, really nothing. I can really say that about me, stark and stiff.” Stralsund as the focal point of socialist conditions of value creation: A ship may be completed every two weeks, but housing, let alone leisure facilities aren’t. The diagnosis: The quality-of-life to performance ratio is less than ideal. The brigade’s team spirit, though, is still strong, even if, as some think, there are some shortcomings on the “ideological side”.

Railway slewing cranes by TAKRAF in global use: salvaging derailed trains, assembling bridges, moving goods. The company, now operating again under the name “Kirow” and based in Leipzig-Lindenau, has been able to maintain its standing on the global market until the present day. Constantly improved operating comfort and increased maximum loads represent 100 years of the art of engineering.

After the military coup in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende in 1973, tens of thousands of opposition members were persecuted and murdered. The GDR took in about 2,000 refugees, including nine-year-old Tania and her family. The fact that the GDR was initially sceptical about Allende’s politics and granted political asylum only to selected Chileans is part of the logic of a bipolar world order.

Rolling into the village: Circus Hein. Angelika Andrees is interested in the individual acts presented in the ring, but even more in what happens before and afterwards. Or what the audience look like from below, when various bottoms are squashed on the wooden benches. Sometimes there’s clacking and knocking, or the pattering of rain, and in the end, Bob Dylan sings. “Travelling Circus” was made when Andrees was still at the Babelsberg Film Academy. She experiments with different elements, switches tones and thus captures the moods crystallising around the travelling attraction. A portrait emerges, without commentary and with very few, short interview sequences.