Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow could hardly have chosen a worse time to make one of the most outstanding and enduring early talkies in 1931/32. Or a better time. Shortly after the film came out in early 1932, it was censored by the Weimar government for political and socio-cultural reasons. The film's creative team protested and involved the censorship office in several rounds of debate that read like a thriller, but eventually lost.
The Nazis, who came to power less than a year later, made short shrift of any further discussion by outlawing the film, among many other early masterpieces, completely and without any further legal recourse, doing major damage to its filmic legacy for decades.
In typical dialectical fashion and only partly ironically,
Brecht commented that hardly anyone had understood their intentions and social critique as well as the Weimar censor, and that the resulting shorter version of the film --leaving out two fairly crucial scenes, lost forever but later re-enacted for the revealing DEFA documentary "Kuhle Wampe Censored" in the 1970s from the original actors' memory-- was much tighter. And indeed the censors did take their job seriously, analysing every scene and sentence over a 30-page document that also includes a remarkable rebuttal and call for freedom of expression by high-ranking cultural diplomat Count Kessler.
Here are just three excerpts from that time that throw different perspectives on the case and the film itself:
Neue Montags-Zeitung, April 14, 1932: "Fascist Censorship: The banning of the film 'Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World?'"
Let’s be clear: banning the film "Kuhle Wampe" is a serious blow for all those who, in the face of an artistically and financially destitute bourgeois film production scene, have tried to make a positive contribution. All the right elements had finally come together.
Brecht, Ottwalt, Eisler and Dudow had created the collective foundation for a successful challenge to the tasteless kitsch that currently predominates. The behind-the-scenes coterie that surrounds Herr Groener, the Reich’s Interior Minister, however, has no interest in protecting German film production.
Again and again they looked for reasons that could justify the banning of "Kuhle Wampe": a threat to public order, ridiculing of the Church, ridiculing of the Social Democratic Party. Any such justification is itself so ridiculous that it is not even worth talking about.
Let’s talk about the film itself.
"Kuhle Wampe" is not a cohesive or coherent oeuvre. It contains many artistic and ideological errors. But as a whole, the film is extraordinary. It is not a film in the traditional, bourgeois sense. It is a proletarian film, set among proletarians and acted by proletarians. It is a cinematic report of the lives of the five million workers who have seen their factories close and shut them out. Three scenes, three contexts are depicted in the film: unemployment, allotment gardens and blue-collar sports. It is not always clear how these three elements fit together. In many ways, the distinctions between them lack ideological clarity. And much of what should have been said remains unsaid. These failings are due to censorship but they are also, at least in part, due to the fact that Brecht’s discovery of his sympathy for the labour movement was a theoretical one initially. As a result, the main character of the film, the young proletarian played by Ernst Busch, is not depicted accurately, neither in terms of his psychology nor in terms of his social class. Everything about the main character remains blurred: his evolution, his life and his social consciousness.
The film’s greatness lies somewhere else.
Using short cross-fades, it succeeds in capturing a mass movement and a mass sentiment. And while the images of the unemployed who hurry on bicycles from one factory to another, of the beer binge at the “Kuhle Wampe” allotment garden, and of the meeting of the proletarian sports clubs are somewhat isolated from one another, these scenes are beautiful glimpses of rare, artistic intensity whose power is augmented by the
splendid music composed by Hanns Eisler.
From a Marxist perspective, the film is imperfect. But as an artistic foray, as an attempt to feature a new ideology in film, it is something quite unique and special. This serious and objective cinematic work that seeks only to report has now been banned by the censors. How true it was when a certain Prussian minister said the other day that it could not be the task of the state to create culture. This country and its dominant social order acts on one and only one imperative: ban all that is new, important and productive. A film gets banned when it seeks to provide a little sun, a little light, a little joy and a little optimism to those five million who cannot make ends meet. A film gets banned when it points to a solution, when it shows the five million that they must join forces in fighting for their future.
A threat to public order? Nothing compromises public order more than the constant churning out of new bans, emergency decrees and prohibitions. [h. s.]
Neue Montags-Zeitung, June 6, 1932: "An Afterword to 'Kuhle Wampe'"
On the same day that Germany’s Brüning government was toppled, the film
"Kuhle Wampe" premiered with great success.
It is the first proletarian talking picture that was shot in Germany. Considering the challenges surrounding its production,
there can only be one regret: that this film was not produced ten years earlier.
If it had been, other films would have followed that would have picked up, expanded and developed the ideas it contains. Today, the censors will not even allow a proletarian film to refer explicitly to proletarian newspapers; that is what happened in the case of "Kuhle Wampe". Ours are times when those who work in film can only speak in parables and use parables to express what they seek to communicate from the screen down to the masses.
This is what “Kuhle Wampe” has tried to achieve. It is a parable that uses three examples to show how varied proletarian action can be and what consequences such action can engender.
As we understand it, the film company that produced "Kuhle Wampe" is planning a new film in the very near future using the same team. [h. s.]
both texts abridged and translated from the original Neue Montags-Zeitung
From a letter dated 13 March 1933 by the Director of the Bavarian Film Office South to the Bavarian Justice Ministry (on NSDAP letterhead):
I request that all attached films of purely communist, marxist and pacifist content shall be banned in the state of Bavaria based on the
Notverordnung zum Schutze von Volk und Staat (Emergency Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State). The legal basis for my request is obvious. Although the cinema owners would love to cancel screenings of these films, they have as of yet had no legal right to do so, as the Jewish film distributors force them to run these films.
((On the attached list are "Kuhle Wampe" as well as "The Three Penny Opera", "Nothing New on the Western Front", "Battleship Potemkin" and many other early classics.))
image: cover of the DEFA DVD "'Kuhle Wampe' Censored"
