Thomas Brasch was a poet, dramatist and director. He was born in England to exiled Jewish communist parents and grew up in the DDR, i.e., the German Democratic Republic, where the second adjective may be a pleonasm, but somehow it had to stand out from the Western, Federal, revanchist and capitalist one. Nevertheless Thomas, who went for a few years to the National Cadet School of the People's Army before he studied dramaturgy at Babelsberg, never missed an opportunity to criticize the regime, with the result that he was expelled from schools and universities and worked as waiter, blacksmith and field hand.

In 1976 he finally managed to get banished from the Republic and moved to West Berlin with his life companion Katharina Thalbach, yes, the one who played the stepmother and mistress of Oskar in "Tin Drum". And when he decided to shoot a film with my associate von Vietinghoff as producer, they put me into the package. The truth is that I wanted to do it because they had hired cinematographer Walter Lassally whom I knew little and admired a lot, but had never worked with.

The scenario was based on a true story of the Cold War, the blockade of Berlin in 1948 by the Soviet Union and the Allied airlift to supply the city. Twenty-year-old Werner Gladow sets up a violent gang of 80 juveniles and by various tricks circulates counterfit money, first on the Alexanderplatz black market and later in the whole of West Berlin. Gladow has the misfortune to get busted in the Eastern Sector where the death penalty is still in force and there is even an executioner for the guillotine, which of course I had to build. I teased Thomas calling him "Stürmer und Dränger", which would mean "stormy and stressy" if it weren’t incorrect German, but everyone understood.