German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

Framing our March 7-14 film series Heimat NOW, we are asking filmmakers from different backgrounds and places What's your #SoundOfHeimat. Here is what German doc directors Arne Birkenstock and Jan Tengeler, from whose music documentary SOUND OF HEIMAT we borrowed the title of our campaign, had to say ... or rather enthusiastically perform for you right here:

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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?'"
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Onwards, and not forgetting – The Canadian Opera Company's Johannes Debus on Hanns Eisler’s music for the film “Kuhle Wampe”


Eisler’s music doesn’t illustrate, doesn’t just accompany or go for the manipulative, superficial and overwhelming effect of evoking emotions. Eisler aims at adding to the intentionally unsentimental, unromantic and laconic quality of the film an independent, autonomous musical commentary.

Be it a baroque prelude, hectic mechanical rondos that remain unresolved, agit-prop songs, a parody of nursery rhymes, poor people’s street music with a singing saw or ironic march quotations: Eisler’s music is moving without being sentimental. It takes a stand, gets involved, shakes things up - and it requests of its viewers/listeners to be equally alert.

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