Kuhle wampe: Oder wem gehort die welt? = To Whom does the world belong?

This film is a docu-drama focused on working class life in Berlin during the early thirties. Kuhle Wampe was a camp for the unemployed on the outskirts of the city. Anni, stifled by Kuhle Wampe’s inhabitants’ desire for bourgeois respectability finds new purpose in a left-wing youth movement. Brecht, co-author Ottwalt and friend, young Bulgarian director, Dudow, saw the film as contrasting ‘the petty bourgeois world and the politically conscious workers’ sports environment… (to) show how young people grow out of the middle-class confines into proletarian solidarity’, to quote Dudow. The film’s didacticism (characters as representative of their class) is combined with an almost lyrical naturalism. Kuhle Wampe was banned by the Nazis in 1933. In German with English subtitles. Cast includes Hertha Thiele, Ernst Busch, Martha Wolter and Lilli Schonborn. Notes by Hans Gunther Pflaum. The film is followed by a video essay by freelance writer, former film critic and teacher Andrew Hoellering, son of ‘Kuhle Wampe’s‘ producer, Georg Hoellering.