Set during the Thirty Years' War, in the first half of the 17th century: Anna Fierling, also called Mother Courage, is a merchant with a wagonload of food and goods. She stays out of politics, following the armies as they move back and forth across Central Europe, and does not bemoan war's injustices. She is passionately committed to her three children and tries to protect them. But one after the other, she loses them to the war from which she profits. This does not change her mind about war, however, and Mother Courage diligently continues to ply her trade. This film is strictly modelled upon the 1949 Berliner Ensemble (BE) production of Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht and Erich Engel. A film adaptation had been in discussion since the late 1940s; but neither Erich Engel nor director Wolfgang Staudte, who had already shot parts of an earlier version of the film in 1955, were able to please Brecht. Finally, Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth, two BE directors, took on the project and produced a film in the tradition of Brecht's epic theater with actors of the BE ensemble.

Berlin in the 1950s: divided, but not yet walled. Young artists, at the start of their careers and seeking a new lifestyle, frequented the East Berlin cafés and bars that were meeting places for intellectuals, as well as Cold War secret service agents and black marketeers. Former East Berlin bohemians gather at Ganymed, the legendary restaurant near Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. In the early 1990s, soon after the fall of the Wall, they recall the atmosphere of their city in the 1950s... which changed so abruptly when the Wall went up in 1961. They relate defining encounters with key players of the East Berlin art scene, especially theater reformer Bertolt Brecht. Director Peter Voigt-Brecht's youngest assistant and himself part of the 1950s art scene-uses interviews, archival materials and atmospheric images of the period in this multi-layered film essay.

They are East Berlin teenagers. They want to be free - to dance to rock'n'roll, trade forbidden western goods and get away from the constraints of their parents and the state. This classic 1950's teen cult film became a box-office hit and was greeted with suspicion by East German officials. Ranked by film critics among Germany's 100 Most Important Films, this Kohlhaase-Klein collaboration makes an important contribution to the international youth film genre. One of the "Berlin Films" made by Klein and scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, this film was part of the Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany series, screened at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005.