has artistic qualities, while the second deteriorated... Due to over-idealization. In many aspects, it is simply embarrassing." Historical accuracy Shortly after the script of Son of his Class was approved, DEFA director-general Joseph Schwab told the Thälmann committee members that he was concerned about the veracity of the plot. He pointed out three inaccuracies: in 1918, there were no Workers' and Soldiers' Councils on the Western Front, only inside Germany; the American general accompanying Mr. McFuller could not have been present in Berlin during the crushing of the Spartacus Uprising, since peace with the United States was not achieved yet; and finally, Wilhelm Pieck was not with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on 9 November 1918. Only Pieck's part was omitted from the screenplay. Bredel told Schwab the rest would be left for the decision of the Politburo. The scenes which the director-general opposed to appear in the film. In a meeting held in East Berlin's Academy of Sciences on 17 November 1955, West German film critic Klaus Norbert Schäffer told writer Michael Tschesno-Hell the second part focused solely on the communist resistance to the Nazis, ignoring the Social-Democrats and others who opposed the regime. He also mentioned that while Thälmann was incarcerated in three different prisons, the film gives the impression he was held only in one. Another point made by Schäffer was that the arms shipment promised to the communist rebels in Hamburg was intercepted by the army, and not held back by Thälmann's enemies in the party, as seen in Son of his Class. Tschesno-Hell responded to Schäffer by telling: "there are great truths and minor truths. In art, it is completely legitimate to permit the great ones have precedence." René Börrner noted the film skipped over the years between 1924 and 1930, thus ignoring Thälmann's ascendance to the position of party chief - and the many controversies and ideological rifts which characterized the KPD in those days. Journalist Erich Wollenberg, a former member of the KPD, wrote a review of Son of his Class in 1954, in which he claimed the film was a "cocktail of heroic lies and distortions, with few drops of truth mixed in it." He pointed out that, contrary to the film, Thälmann was not on the Western Front when the German Revolution broke out on 5 November 1918, but in Hamburg: this detail was cited in Thälmann's official biography, written by