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Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?

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In line with its broader mission to promote the study and appreciation of East German cinema, the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts has recently released a restored DVD edition of Slatan Dudow's 1932 classic, Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World? The production of the film is of exceptional significance due to the close collaboration of the Bulgarian-born Dudow with playwright Bertoh Brecht and composer Harms Eisler, the latter two of whom went on to share one of the era's most influential and creative partnerships. After several battles with censorship and financial insolvency, Kuhle Wampe would emerge from the chaotic last years of the Weimar Republic with a bold Marxist esthetic and a new vision of proletarian culture.

The creative triumvirate that made it aside, Kuhle Wampe stands as a testament to a side of Weimar film that is often overlooked--the cinematic achievements of the intellectual left and of the Communist Party. This is due in part to the domination of the Weimar film industry by the powerful, vertically integrated UFA Film Studio, which was founded by military leadership during World War I, denationalized after the war, and renationalized under the Nazis. But the title of Siegfried Kracauer's influential study of Weimar Cinema, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), also points to another reason for this general oversight, that is, a tendency to read Weimar cinema teleologically, as if one can find in it the symptoms that would eventually produce the Nazi affliction. To do so, however, is to submit to a certain kind of tragic fatalism that risks undervaluing the efforts of those who fought that very sense of inevitability. In this sense, Kuhle Wampe is both ideological battleground and tribute to the significant cultural and political role played by cinema even at a moment of such extreme unrest.

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Significant, too, in this respect is Prometheus Film, the film distribution and production company, whose close ties to the Communist Party of Germany led to its production of Kuhle Wampe in 1931. Started by the IAH (International Worker's Fund) and its founder, Willi Munzenberg, Prometheus was specifically organized in order to distribute Eisenstein's cinematic powderkeg, Battleship Potemkin, which it did in 1926 despite governmental censorship and interference from the right. With the success of Battleship Potemkin, Prometheus expanded to include the production of films--like Kuhle Wampe--that could bolster the party's efforts in other ways. When the global financial crises of the early 1930s hit, however, Prometheus became insolvent midproduction, in February 1932, but the film was fortunately rescued by the Praesens Film Company and finished production in March 1932. As with Battleship Potemkin, Kuhle Wampe...

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