Kuhle Wampe

 

Hertha Thiele looking natty with a tie on in Kuhle Wampe

Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe, from 1932, is an interesting mix of social realism and agitprop. The film opens in a Berlin reeling from the reverberations of the stock market crash of 1929. A series of newspaper headlines chronicle the economic collapse followed by tracking shots of workers futilely pedaling in search of jobs. Anni, the protagonist played by Madchen in Uniform's Hertha Thiele, is the only member of her family earning a salary. Despair and shame drives her brother to suicide via defenestration. Anni's family is subsequently evicted from their apartment.

With the help of Anni's mechanic boyfriend, Fritz (Ernst Busch), the family settles in a tent city on the outskirts of town. The disused summer camp is named Kuhle Wampe (or "Empty Stomach"). Dudow chastely evokes the romance of Anni and Fritz with shots of rustling bushes and fluttering trees. Anni finds that she is pregnant and Fritz agrees to an engagement, but is not really committed to settling down. Complications ensue, but once Fritz has his consciousness raised at a Communist youth sporting meet, where the attendees discuss Hegel between events, the lovers are reconciled.

Dudow was Bulgarian born, but had begun working in the Leftist theater shortly after emigrating to Germany in 1919. He soon met and collaborated with Bertolt Brecht, Kuhle Wampe's screenwriter. Not surprisingly, the script relies too much on Marxist maxims, particularly in the last reel which climaxes with a musical celebration of worker solidarity. 

Dudow's deft touch with character vignettes often ameliorates Brecht's more strident moments. Dudow's players are all too recognisably human even when embodying Brecht's stereotyping of the vulgar bourgeoisie; especially during a sodden engagement party and a debate about global capitalism that almost sinks the finale. Hanns Eisler's score also adds some needed lyricism. I loved the duet between harmonium and saw in the Berlin section and a later singalong to "Just a Gigolo". 

After Hitler seized total power in the next year, Kuhle Wampe was banned and, then, little seen until a recent reconstruction. Its makers all fled Germany, but were reunited in the GDR after the Second World War. The film stands as an intermittently entertaining example of German Communist ferment before it was subsumed by the Third Reich. The Communist rally in Kuhle Wampe seems, to this political centrist and believer in the Horseshoe theory, a B level foreshadowing of the fascist idolatry of Triumph of the Will.