Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Astronauts provided the basis for the first DEFA science fiction film. Kurt Maetzig proffered in 1959 a vision of the future: in the year 1970 an international expedition flew eight scientists to Venus after the mysterious discovery of a “spool” in the Gobi Desert. During the spaceflight the American nuclear physicist Hawling managed to decipher its alarming message: a declaration of nuclear war on the Earth. When the spaceship landed on Venus the scientists came across the radioactive remnants of a destroyed intelligent civilisation. The population had evidently wiped themselves out with their own weapons, which had originally been aimed at the Earth. The spaceship crew now had to return home urgently with their redemptive news. The ambitious DEFA project appeared in cinemas in February 1960, only a few months after the Russians had achieved the first landing on the moon of an unmanned probe. At the time, when belief in science and technology was at its peak, anything seemed possible in the near future. In West Germany the film was shown six months later under the name Venus antwortet nicht, and in a fascinated USA as First Spaceship on Venus. In 1964 at the Utopian Film Festival in Trieste the film received a Golden Spaceship award; in the new millennium it was screened at, amongst others, the 2006 Utopiales Internationales Science-Fiction Festival Nantes during its ‘Invaders from Marx!’ retrospective.