Bernhard Wicki’s first feature film is considered by many critics to be the most important of the period and was one of the first postwar productions with a truly worldwide release. An uncompromising study of the cruelty and absurdity of war, the film unfolds through the story of seven schoolboys in a small city who are called up to the army in April 1945. Without any training, they are assigned to defend a small bridge against the approaching Americans. While in Nazi cinema death often had been glorified as noble sacrifice for the country, Wicki’s film—which evoked comparisons to the merciless realism of works by prewar directors such as G. W. Pabst—sends the young protagonists from carefree adolescence into the full horror and delusion of war.