In the final scene on the crowded tram backto Berlin, the workersgetafirst
chance to test their new rhetorical skills in discussions with several middle- and
lower-middle class passengers. Their competing interpretations ofasensational
newspaper story about the burning of twenty-fourmillion poundsofcoffee in
Brazil connect the problems of ordinaryBerliners to the movements ofglobal
capital. The filmic presentation equates the proposed solutions with specific
class positions(bourgeois, petty bourgeois) and reactionary ideologies (nation-
alism,colonialism, militarism). Drawing on the typologyofclassperfected by
George Groszand Otto Dix, the confrontation between middle-aged burghers
and (silent) plump matrons,onthe one side, andyoung,slender,and articulate
male and femaleworkers, on the other,stages the class divides in explicitlycor-
poreal and sartorialterms. Significantly, the question of who willchangethe
world is answered through the equation of communismwith youth as the em-
bodiment of abetter future. Marchinginto the underpass and towardthe
light,the workers return toBerlin accompanied byarousing rendition of the
“Solidarity Song”and its increasinglyprobing question,“Who owns the world?”
So far,key sequenceshavebeen usedto reconstruct the simultaneouslyde-
stabilizingand radicalizing effects of the female perspective on a“typical”story
of unwanted pregnancyand an“atypical”story of broken engagement.The in-
sertion of this female perspective intoaconventionallymale script of proletarian
mobilization perfectlyillustrates the operative method:that is, an intervention
into socialreality through ascrambling of the discourses–fictionversus docu-
mentary,privateversus public, and emotional immersionversus critical detach-
ment–thatdefine classical narrative in the cinema. The same can be concluded
about the film and its particularmode of production. On the formal level of edit-
ing and montage, Brecht and Dudow established their own position of“not lik-
ing it”through atwo-pronged strategy:the critical insightsgainedfrom the ten-
sion between fictional and documentary material and the emotional intensities
generated through the tension between analytical and associativeediting.
KuhleWampesatisfiesTretyakov’sdefinition of operativity–the choice of
the right subjectmatter (sujet), the analysis of the fact in its concrete manifesta-
tions, and the conditions conducive to transforming facts into arguments–even
as regards the last criterion,“the participation in the life of the subject itself.”⁶
Brecht and Dudow maynot have joined the workers in the factoriesorthe tene-
ments, the literarystrategyadvocatedbythe BPRS, but they did, in fact,inter-
SergejTretyakov,“Der Schriftsteller und das sozialistische Dorf,”inDie Arbeit des Schriftstel-
lers.Aufsätze Reportagen Porträts,ed. Heiner Boehncke,trans. Karla Hielscher(Reinbek: Row-
ohlt, 1972), 120. This lecturewas first giveninBerlin inJanuary 1931.
Kuhle Wampeand“Those Who Don’tLike It” 327