STERNE TELLS ANOTHER antifascist conversion narrative, this time of a German soldier stationed in a small Bulgarian town during the Second World War. Like Friedel in Die Genesung and Lissy, Walter (JÜrgen Frohriep) is an apolitical soldier, more interested in his landscape-painting hobby than in his duties as a Wehrmacht occupation soldier. When he responds with an indifferent shrug to a request to send a doctor into the Jewish camp to help a woman in labor and is then called inhuman by a Jewish woman (Sascha Kruscharska), his conscience is pricked, and he gets to know the woman (symbolically named Ruth), eventually falling in love with her. Although he wants to help her escape the camp before its occupants are deported to Auschwitz, he arrives too late, tricked by one of his fellow soldiers (Kurt, played by Erik Klein). At the end, however, we know Walter will join the Bulgarian partisans resisting the Nazis, just as we know at the end of Lissy that the protagonist will oppose fascism. Sterne was a Bulgarian-East German co-production, shot in several different languages—German, Bulgarian and Ladino for the Jews—and the West German government tried (unsuccessfully) to block its being shown at film festivals; its script was written by the Bulgarian Angel Wagenstein (b.1922), himself also a director as well as an author. Wolf was not able to obtain the actors he had originally wanted for the roles of Walter and Ruth; both JÜrgen Frohriep and Sascha Kruscharska (then a student) were relatively inexperienced and needed much coaching from the director. Others in the cast were veterans: Erik S. Klein, as Walter's friend Kurt, gives a much more subtle and nuanced portrayal of a German soldier than, for instance, the Nazi Kaczmierczik in Lissy. The film's low-key lighting and restrained use of music contributed to an overall poetics of understatement that makes it one of the most successful of early Holocaust dramas.

The film's reception is unusual within Wolf's oeuvre, first because it had international resonance at the time of its release, and second for having been recently analyzed by Elsaesser.