“So, who will
change the World?
Those who don’t
like it as it is!”
There are some films that just chill you to the bone with
a combination of context, hindsight and the present. Who Owns the World? or Kuhle
Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt?, to give it its full German title, is just
one of those films for a whole range of reasons, chiefly its sense of pride,
optimism and resolution. Made in early 1932 when Germany had five million
unemployed, a mass of debt and extremists promising a solution that, as we now
know, would hit the country sooner and harder than they could ever expect, its
message that the World must change and it will be changed for the better is heart-breaking.
This was Bertolt Brecht’s follow up to the
enormously-successful Threepenny Opera and he took more control over
proceedings with director Slatan Dudow, easier for him to work through than the
powerful Herr Pabst. It’s almost a silent film with sparse dialogue leaving the
focus on the songs with Brecht’s lyrics and Hanns Eisler’s music with the Solidarity Song sticking in my head as I
left the cinema: “Forward – and never
forget our solidarity!”
 |
| Solidarity through song |
The film contains some magnificent shots, courtesy of cinematographer
Günther Krampf, and, feels more like People on a Sunday than the studio-bound Opera. Brecht said that a quarter of it
was filmed in just two days and it does feel naturalistically rough and ready,
like Ken Loach four decades before his time along with what feels like
improvised dialogue and the actors working off situations.
The most scripted part of the film – directed by Brecht -
feels like the final sequence on the commuter train where people from all walks
of life discuss the state of things and the way forward. Everyone is here,
whether from Weimar Berlin or Brexit South-Eastern suburbs, the middle-aged,
the old and the young all seeing different things as eternal truths are
exchanged – comfortable conservatives and struggling youth in opposition about
to be outflanked by a pernicious mix of twisted nationalism and ruthless state
control that generated an incredible pace of change and used that as its
justification.
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| The desperate bicycles |
Equally powerful are the opening sequences in which young
men on bicycles scour the city for work, waiting in groups to hear of possible
vacancies before racing to find nothing. Feet peddle hard, the young men are
determined and fast but not quick enough.
Back home in a tenement block, one of the young men (Adolf Fischer) is chided
by his father for being useless, he’s been unemployed for seven months and with
the family struggling he needs to pay his way. His sister Anni (Hertha Thiele,
who has a stunning blonde close-crop not unlike Lynda la Plante) is the only
one employed and her pride shines through as her brother’s silence reveals his
desperation. The second he stands up and removes his watch, we know exactly
what he’s going to do, and, with everyone else out he walks to the window and
dives to his death four storeys below; at least they can sell his watch.
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| Alfred Schaefer |
Things do not improve after his death and the family is
evicted before moving in with Anni’s boyfriend Fritz (Ernst Busch) in his tent
at Kuhle Wampe a former holiday spot on the Müggelsee in Berlin. Anni gets
pregnant but Fritz doesn’t want to lose his freedom… Never the less and
engagement is announced and there’s another lovely set piece as everyone gets
drunk. Everyone that is except for a miserable Fritz and a resigned Anni who
walks off to go stay with her pal Gerda (Martha Wolter).
 |
| Hertha Thiele |
Gerda and her boyfriend, Karl Genosse (Adolf Fischer),
are members of a left-wing group that gathers at the weekends to compete at
sport – swimming, rowing, motorcycle racing… all of which goes perfectly well
with discussion about Hegel and a socialist solution.
Their unity helps give Anni the courage to abort her
child and then Fritz finally comes around… there is strength in unity even
after he too loses his job; there is hope.
Then we have that final scene on the train as they head
home as a good cross-section of German society tries to think its way out of
the misery… as they descend into the darkness of the station corridors as the
end our knowledge of what comes next makes it almost unbearable.
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| Train debate: Martha Wolter and Adolf Fischer |
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