Monday 19 September 2022

Solidarity Song… Kuhle Wampe (1932), BFI Blu-ray/DVD Out now!

 

“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 all impossibly poignant given the time of its production. Released 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 (1931) and he took far more control over proceedings with director Slatan Dudow, who was easier for him to work with 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 still a powerful reminder of the forces that divide us: “Forward – and never forget our solidarity!”

 

 

The film contains some magnificent shots, courtesy of cinematographer Günther Krampf (who shot Nosferatu) 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 image of men on two wheels recurs throughout the film: collective motion


The most scripted part of the film – co-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 modern day America and Britain, 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.

 

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. This is one of a number of Brechtian ironies pointed out by writer Andrew Hoellering whose father produced the film. He’s interviewed in one of the extras, dating from 1999 and, this, together with the new commentary from film scholar Adrian Martin, adds a lot of context to the film.

 

Brecht rescripted the film after earlier work from writer Ernst Ottwalt and Slatan Dudow who had found a newspaper article detailing the suicide of a young unemployed worker. Brecht split the film into four sections according to Martin, of which this incident formed the basis of the first following on from the desperate search for work and entitled: One less unemployed man, a pointedly brutal take on the tragedy.

 

Defeated. Adolf Fischer's Karl has no fight left on his own.


Brecht was interested in showing how petit bourgeoise attitudes of individual responsibility fail to take account of structural issues that can only have collective solutions. Back home in a tenement block, one of the young cyclists, Karl (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 was also in Mädchen in Uniform (1931)), is the only one employed and her pride shines through as her brother’s silence reveals his desperation. In another of those Brechtian ironies, the father and mother are also unemployed. All are at their wits’ ends though and the second Karl 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.

 

This section is played out with Soviet-style montage and rapid cuttings, the filmmakers were not just influenced by communism but by the cultural output of the soviet regime. The second section begins with a montage of industrial settings as the family are about to get further crushed by the capitalist machinery. Unable to pay their debts the family is evicted and humiliated in part two, ironically entitled, The most wonderful life for a young person.

 

A solution arrives with them all 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 in a sequence that has clearly gaps left by early censorship. Abortion, then as now, was a hot topic and any direct discussion has been lost. The initial decision is to keep the baby and an engagement is announced and there’s another lovely set piece as everyone gets drunk during an eight-minute-long engagement party. Everyone that is except for a miserable Fritz who feels he has been trapped and is not ready to commit. A resigned Anni walks off to go stay with her pal Gerda (Martha Wolter).

 

Headed in different directions? Hertha Thiele and Ernst Busch


Gerda and her boyfriend 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. As Martin points out, Brecht was less concerned about “centering” the young couples’ story arc than the messaging about collective action and solidarity; their personal solution is as unspecific as that for the “world” and the people.

 

The scenes of the “Worker Athletes” festival at the park are superbly cross-cut, women rowing, men swimming, motorbikes – not pushbikes – being flung hard around the muddy circuit. Dziga Vertov was clearly an influence. Then there is the marvellous Red Megaphone Group who, literally, amplify the concerns of the film and its core family: “forward, without forgetting what it is that makes us strong!”

 

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… leading to the question only the young can answer, in the form of Gerda. As they descend into the darkness of the station corridors as the end our knowledge of what comes next makes it almost unbearable.

 

Strength through harmony


There’s welcome commentary on what became of the main cast and crew with most escaping Germany fairly soon after and Brecht being exiled again after the McCarthy blacklisting of the late 1940s, moving back to East Germany. How close America came then and how close is it now?

 

As Brecht wrote, “whether your belly’s full or empty, go forward without forgetting…”

 

There are the usual excellent special features:

  • Presented in High Definition and Standard Definition
  • Newly commissioned commentary by film scholar Adrian Martin (2022)
  • Introduction and Q&A by Andrew Hoellering (1999, 36 mins + 14 mins): the writer discusses his father’s work on Kuhle Wampe 
  • Bread (1934, 12 mins): a short political film made in protest against social inequality, poverty and unemployment
  • Beyond This Open Road (1934, 11 mins): modernist short by B Vivian Braun and Irene Nicholson, with poetic images of workers’ leisure time
  • Housing Problems (1935, 16 mins): Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey’s powerful documentary about slum housing
  • Eastern Valley (Donald Alexander, 1937, 17 mins): a documentary about a Welsh co-operative scheme run by unemployed miners

 

A lush, illustrated booklet with essays by Martin Koerber and Henry K Miller, an archival review by Jill Forbes (Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1978), notes on the special features and credits - first pressing only, so be quick!

 

 

Another wonderful – historical – release from the BFI and every cineaste’s home should have one. You can order direct from their online shop and express your solidarity in person on the Southbank too!


Martha Wolter tells the train some truths

 



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