A Time to Love and a Time to Die is a love story set amid the ruins of World War II. A young German soldier (John Gavin) returns home on leave during the last days of the war. He re-meets a woman (Lilo Pulver) he had known as a child and, out of loneliness and despair, they begin to fall in love. Sirk counterpoints the film's romanticism with a tone of devastating surrealism--a frozen hand emerging from melting snow, a hearse abandoned in the street during an air raid, a black-market nightclub crowd trying to ignore the flames around them.
R. W. Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard have both written about A Time to Love and a Time to Die. Godard: “I find this film beautiful because the two leading characters manage, by shutting their eyes with a kind of passionate innocence to the bombs falling around them in Berlin, to get deeper into themselves than any other characters in a film before them. It has to be admitted that our old filmmaker has recovered his youthful powers, and is beating all the young directors on their own ground, panning anywhere and everywhere, moving in and out on the action with equal reckless abandon.”
Fassbinder (more cynical): “...in Douglas Sirk where death is, and bombs and cold and tears, there love can grow... In a situation like that love is the least complicated thing of all, the only thing you can understand... The film is not pacifist, as there is not a second which lets us think: if it were not for this lousy war everything would be so wonderful or something. Remarque's novel, “A Time to Live--A Time to Die,” is pacifist. Remarque is saying that if it weren't for the war this would be eternal love. Sirk is saying if it weren't for the war this would not be love at all.”