A love story set amid the ruins of World War II: a young German soldier (JohnGavin) on leave returns to Berlin during the last days of the war and meets a woman (Lilo Pulver) he hadknown as a child. Out of loneliness and despair, they fall in love. Sirk counters the film's romanticism withimages of devastating surrealism: a frozen hand emerging from melting snow, a hearse abandoned in thestreet during an air raid, revelers in a black-market nightclub trying to ignore the flames around them.Jean-Luc Godard and R. W. Fassbinder both have written about A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Godard: "Ifind this film beautiful because the two leading characters manage, by shutting their eyes with a kind ofpassionate innocence to the bombs falling around them in Berlin, to get deeper into themselves than anyother characters in a film before them." Fassbinder, more cynically: "...in Douglas Sirk where death is, andbombs and cold and tears, there love can grow...In a situation like that, love is the least complicated thingof all, the only thing you can understand...The film is not pacifist...Remarque's novel, A Time to Live-ATime to Die is pacifist. Remarque is saying that if it weren't for the war this would be eternal love. Sirk issaying if it weren't for the war this would not be love at all."