"It cannot be said more coarsely and more precisely: in the GDR, German painting is more German…" was the opinion of the writer Günter Grass at the beginning of the 1980s.

The fall of the Wall in 1989 made it possible to take a closer look at this ‘German’ painting of the faded GDR. At the centre of the film is a group picture. The picture was taken in the early 1960s in Leipzig, a field of experimentation and testing for a 'new German realism' under socialist conditions. What connects the founders of the so-called ‘Leipzig School of Painting’ such as Werner Tübke or Bernhard Heisig with the now forgotten painter and SED functionary Heinrich Witz?

The portrait of a ‘German socialist art’ in the GDR up to the building of the wall in 1961.