As the debate over the Hotel Deutschland murals unfolded in the Leipziger Volkszeitung in the summer of 1965, preparations were being made for the Seventh District Art Exhibition in Leipzig. Organized by the local chapter of the Union of Visual Artists, this exhibition was, along with the opening of the hotel, one of the major cultural events in the year-long celebrations for the city's eight hundredth anniversary. Held at the Messehaus am Markt, a new building located across the square from the historic city hall in downtown Leipzig and just up the street from the Hotel Deutschland, “the Seventh” contained 759 works by 175 artists, including three paintings and a number of prints and drawings by Heisig. One of these, a large oil titled Pariser Kommune (The Paris Commune, 1965, fig. 4.1), became embroiled in controversy before the exhibition closed, Heisig's third such entanglement in less than two years.

The controversy around The Paris Commune centered on the seeming pessimism of the work, which marked a significant change in his portrayal of the subject. The first Socialist government on European soil, the short-lived Paris Commune was considered an important precursor to the GDR by many in East Germany and was a topic that Heisig had been making prints and paintings about for several years. But whereas his paintings from 1960 and 1962 focused on the beginnings of the commune, the hopeful early days after it was first established in March 1871, the 1965 painting focused on its bloody end two months later when, in May 1871, Parisians vainly defended their newly created Socialist government against heavily armed French troops. In addition to the temporal shift to the end of the commune, the 1965 painting also marked the culmination of a stylistic change in Heisig's work that began in the wake of his controversial speech at the Fifth Congress with the Christmas Dream of the Unteachable Soldier (1964) and the Hotel Deutschland murals— away from the straightforward realism that had previously dominated his easel paintings to one that combined multiple moments and events into one complex image.