In the 1930s, the director of the Waried shipping company took a film camera with him on his travels. It was the era of the Great Depression - and it was also the early days of the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany. Amateur filmmaker Adolf Schneider took movies of ship christenings and launchings, their concomitant celebrations and sea trials. But he also filmed vacation trips and family outings. The movies he made render a portrait of an age and a society in transition, a society heading for a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions about which it obviously had no premonition whatever.