Kuhle Wampe

Brecht scripted and participated in the making of this film, an unsentimental view of life in Kuhle Wampe, a camp for the dispossessed. Brecht saw its docile inhabitants (who struggled to maintain their dignity through an obsessive tidiness and attention to the forms of 'respectable' life) as wasting the opportunity for class solidarity and revolution. The heroine rejects this stifling of her spirit, to find moral renewal and purpose with a left wing youth movement. Brecht employs his usual mixture of didacticism (the film bears the alternative title, To Whom Does the World Belong?) and an almost lyrical naturalism that encourages the viewer to put across his own socio-economic analyses. What is curiously absent, however, is any treatment of the rise of the Nazis. Hitler came to power only nine months after the premiere of Kuhle Wampe in May 1932, and wasted little time in banning this charming and subversive film.