Story of a Young Couple (1952)

A young married couple-both actors-work in Cold War Berlin before the Wall is built. Agnes is on location in East Berlin, and Jochen, her husband, works at the Westend Theater in West Berlin. They hold diametrically opposed views on politics, art and the responsibility of the individual to society. As they have vehement arguments, their marriage is in danger of breaking up. This film portrays numerous figures of contemporary German cultural and political life-including Veit Harlan, director of the notorious Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss, and Boleslaw Barlog, a famous West Berlin theater director. Also memorable in this film is documentary footage of the construction of Stalin Allee, the biggest boulevard built in East Berlin after WWII, soon to become a central locus of the popular uprising of 17 June 1953. Although director Kurt Maetzig depicts Cold War Berlin with dramatic verve, the film illustrates the tightening grip of Stalinism on East German cultural production at this time.