The show reflects the life of a petty bourgeois family in West German Wattenscheid, characterised by the social climate of the Willy Brandt era and its political upheavals initiated by the German student movement of 1968. "Ein Herz und eine Seele" makes intensive use of references to German politics and social issues of the early and mid-1970s, when Germany was still divided, not just between East and West, but also (in the case of West Germany) between liberals and conservatives. To feature these tensions in a TV series broke new ground at that time.