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A German life. An exemplary communist career. Belief in a historical failure, unshakable until the very last breath. Not the shadow of a doubt or remorse. Erich Honecker was what one would call bullheaded. He was as unfaltering dealing with the Nazis who threw him into prison as he was dealing with the dissenters among his own ranks. And he embodies "his" state, the GDR, even today – almost ten years after his death and a decade after its fall. This man, born in 1912 in the Saarland, ruled the eastern part of Germany for almost twenty years, and led it into ruin. After overthrowing Ulbricht, whom he hated as a "modernizer", he sealed his thoughts off from any reform, cemented dictatorship and had a cult staged around his person reminiscent of Stalin’s times. The building of the Berlin Wall and the firing order on the inner-German border are connected to him as much as is his attempt at selectively reclaiming the Prussian-German history for the GDR and bringing about a re-evaluation thereof on an international level. This man, a firm believer in the state apparatus and mechanisms, had no visions – his only vision maybe being that the Wall would still be standing in a hundred years. Under his aegis, the Stasi mutated into an omnipresent terror, spying even on himself. One can feel his legacy even today – in the former GDR’s mismanagement that still lingers, or in its self-pitying transfiguration as "victims of the reunification". In this documentary feature we follow the life of the party soldier Honecker, scion of a miner’s family in Neunkirchen, who started his political career at the age of ten, by the means of filmed documents and interviews with contemporary witnesses. Members of his family, former friends and opponents like Heinz Kessler, Günter Schabowski, Wolf Biermann and others provide information concerning this opportunist, who was always true to his own principles, and who unscrupulously thrust aside friend and foe should they stand in his way to power. Even the married FDJ-leader’s affair with the attractive Margot Feist in the year of the public uprising in the GDR did not cause any lasting damage to his carefully planned and secured career in the party. Honecker did the "dirty work" for Ulbricht, denounced skeptics, had a knowledge of the apparatus of the state second to none, and successfully disposed of his adversaries, until he, in 1971, forced Ulbricht into retirement with the aid of the Soviets. But in 1989, he ridiculed Gorbatshev’s reforms as temporal madness – his biggest mistake, but partly also attributable to the fact that he did not see any other chance for himself – thereby provoking the peaceful revolution in the streets of the GDR that threw him out of power as an obsolete symbol of the failure of real existing socialism. His sad end in Chilean exile in 1994 was the end of an incorrigible man, who had lost his grip on reality a long time ago.