In his experimental short film, director Karsten Wiesel examines the brief propaganda films destined for the civics school classes in East Germany. The authorities used the same archive footage over decades, but edited it differently.

Work was the most important subject of these propaganda films. A glance into the archive has brought to light, that the editing of the footage was rather serious at first, livelier and more attractive to their teenage audience later on. THE NEW ERA is a kind of new civics version from 2006. It conjures up some ghosts of an era long gone, where some people dreamed of a flawless society and the new socialist man, an ideal human modeled after a human ideal.