Niklaus Schilling describes the setting for his satiric look at contemporary Germany:
“As a result of World War II, there exist today two German states: The Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Just precisely on the Western side, at the borderline of two political systems, there is located the sleepy little town of Friedheim: nothing happens anymore at the edge of the Western World. And this is fatal for the newspaper of the divided Werra valley. If Willi Busch, the reporter of the Werra-Post, wants to prevent the journal from going bankrupt, something has to happen... a tragic German comedy begins.”
...in which Willi, reduced to inventing news, discovers, among other things, that Goebbels was once made an honorary citizen of the town. Variety's Ron Holloway calls Schilling “a filmmaker's filmmaker... (who) uses every trick at his command to mix irony and satire, symbol and metaphor, into a banal story aimed to amuse as it embarrasses. The embarrassment has everything to do with what West Germany means for the stuffy upper middle class today.”
A former cameraman for several filmmakers, including Jean-Marie Straub, Niklaus Schilling made short films in the Sixties before turning to feature filmmaking with Nachtschatten (Night Shade, 1971), Die Vertreibung Aus Dem Paradies (Expelled from Paradise, 1976), Rhinegold (1977), and Der Willi-Busch-Report, which was shown at the 1980 Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals.