Synopsis:
A Berlin Romance is a love story about the seventeen-year-old Uschi, an East German saleswoman, and Hans, an unemployed auto mechanic from West Berlin. The city is reflected though their eyes and feelings. The bright shop windows in West Berlin are much more appealing to Uschi than the plain gray buildings in the East, so she leaves her parents' house for the West. Together with her, the audience takes a glance behind the façade of the West German "economic miracle." In the end, she returns home to her parents along with Hans, who finds a job and makes a living in the East. This film was the second work of director Gerhard Klein and scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase after the children's detective story Alarm in the Circus. Inspired by Italian neo-realist film, these artists accurately depict the day-to-day life of the divided city. However, the frank images of dreams and longings of Berlin youth found little support in the Ministry of Film in the German Democratic Republic. Among other criticisms, the film was said to encourage East German youth to search for adventure in West Germany. Klein and Kohlhaase didn't let these obstacles get in their way and later filmed the movie Berlin: Schoenhauser Corner (1957), another realistic Berlin film. These films are now considered the best and most precise portrayals of the East Berlin youth scene during the Cold War.

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