Marieluise, a milker's daughter and one of 6 siblings, is now 20 years old. Her friends and also the film crew now call her Mary. She has a boyfriend in Berlin: Georg, 25 years old, a music student. Mary herself has completed an apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory assistant in Frankfurt/Oder and works in the semiconductor plant there. She self-confidently demands an equal partnership from her older boyfriend, and she also knows how to assert herself against her parents. Winfried Junge's film about Mary impresses with the openness of its main protagonist. She is hungry for life and does not mince words. She says she knows too many people who keep their mouths shut for their own sake and only think as far as their own doorstep. She doesn't want to be like that. Unlike many of her former classmates, she doesn't want to start a family just yet. As the oldest of a large sibling group, she knows all too well that having children limits one's freedom. "I just feel like I haven't seen enough so far, and that life is whizzing by without me realizing it," she says. On weekdays, Mary's home is a transit room in the single people's dormitory in Frankfurt/Oder. Here she is with many other young women who, like her, work in the semiconductor plant. On weekends, Mary often goes to her home village of Golzow, where she lives with her parents. There she sometimes meets former classmates who have long since had children. She explains why she didn't become a mother at 18 or 20 (as was common in the GDR): "I don't want to wake up at forty and find that I haven't lived intensively enough.