Ernst Busch was hyped as an icon of the anti-fascist class struggle – by the GDR and perhaps a little by himself. He rose to fame as a film and theatre star in the 1920s and never made a secret of his leftist views. His history as a morale-boosting singer for the Communist International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his history of persecution under the Nazi regime made him a myth with an immaculate revolutionary pedigree. The portrait dedicated to him by the multi-talented director-poet Peter Voigt reveals the history of Busch’s downfall, for he also regularly went to battle against the SED party bureaucracy. Flattery, disparagement, withdrawn and re-issued party membership books … Sometimes the GDR was maddening.

The interviews conducted by Tamara Trampe in a Pankow kindergarten testify to a rare attempt to enter the world of the young interviewees completely, to give their stories a space where reality and fantasy, worries and wishes can mix freely. A space that’s not always provided in the daily life of the kindergarten, as the film casually suggests even after it was toned down by the DEFA censors: toilets without doors, ghastly birthday parties and friendly but unmistakable reprimands when the children let too much dialect slip into the grammar exercise or when their pictures of soldiers are not realistic enough.