Helmut Kautner - Himmel ohne Sterne [1955]

GDR/FRG, 1953. Young factory worker Anna Kaminski lives right on the border between East and West Germany in Thuringia. Her son Jochen, whose father was killed in the war, is staying with his grandparents in Bavaria, just a few kilometers away in West Germany. To see him, Anna joins a group of refugees fleeing the GDR and secretly sneaks across the border. She is slightly shot in the process, and when Bavarian border policeman Carl Altmann finds her, he helps her. That day, Anna decides to take her son with her to the East against his grandparents' will. Carl helps her again, and the two fall in love. But they can only meet in no man's land, in an abandoned train station between the two German states. Anna is wanted in the West as a child abductor and Carl in the East as an "imperialist spy." When Anna finally decides to flee to the western sector with her son, the border is already almost completely closed-and the story of a love affair comes to a deadly end. Helmut Kautner's famous film about the division of Germany conveys some truths that were unpopular at the time in the form of a classic melodrama: for example, how materialism in West Germany is spread like a thick blanket over the past; how the surveillance regime in East Germany continues to expand; or how badly all these people have been scarred in body and soul by the war. No one wants to be responsible for the border that no one really wants... But everyone continues to do their duty.