Helma Sanders-Brahms based this story of a family torn apart by Hitler's preparations for war and the invasion of Poland on her parents' own story, and included documentary footage to represent “the war I saw in the first years of my life; these were and are the images which sometimes still occur in my dreams....” The film follows a young woman, Helene, whose new husband - militantly pro-Nazi, where she is not - is sent to the front. Helene has her child alone, battles her own way through the war, and develops the strength to survive without her husband. When he returns, she is unable to take on the role of wife: “‘Reconstruction' and the ‘Economic miracle' become just as intolerable to her as the little family which is supposed to carry on as if nothing happened.” In 1950, Helene is ill and embittered; it is her daughter who saves her from suicide.
In a prologue written in 1976, Sanders-Brahms invites Germany, Pale Mother to be taken not just as an indictment of National Socialism, but as an attempt to break into the silence, now an institution, between her generation and that of her parents.