Am Rande der Welt (1927)

The film begins with a rotating globe, intended to symbolize that the story that follows could take place anywhere in the world. In a mill near the border with a hostile neighboring country, a miller lives a simple but contented life with his two sons and daughter Magda. One day, a stranger arrives looking for work. The miller offers him lodging and a job as a mill hand. Magda shows him his room. Another stranger turns up. He carries a peddler’s tray and passes himself off as a peddler and junk dealer. He knocks on the mill hand’s door. The man seems frightened, as though he is being pursued, and opens his door only hesitantly. The two men seem to know each other. The peddler, quite obviously an enemy spy, gives the new mill hand— a traitor to his country whom he has paid—instructions. That evening, the miller’s family gathers in the living room and discusses how to celebrate the mill’s upcoming three-hundredth anniversary. Johannes, the miller’s eldest son, and his wife are expecting a child. The new mill hand seeks Magda’s company and dances with her while the sinister peddler watches them through a peephole. The junk dealer clearly has power over the other man. He puts pressure on him and warns him not to befriend the miller’s family, since they have a strategically important task to carry out here. The mill hand’s assignment is to install a secret telephone line so that, in the event of war, messages can be sent immediately from enemy territory to their homeland. At night, the hired traitor gets to work in the cellar and lays the line. The mill’s 300th anniversary is celebrated on a grand scale, with a fair and carousel, a swing boat, and a show called “The Headless Lady.” Everyone dresses up, and Johannes is still building a cradle for the unborn baby right up to the last minute. Magda’s spying admirer wants to give her a necklace at the fair as a token of his love, but she rejects him. Then strange riders approach the mill. The peddler intercepts them and reveals that he is acting on behalf of the Ministry of War. War has broken out, and people along the border are being mobilized. This news abruptly interrupts the mill’s festivities. In low spirits, everyone goes home or rushes to arms. Only the miller’s son Michael, in his naive patriotism, is delighted and strikes up a song on his fiddle. The stylized figure of Death enthusiastically blows his horn, and we see soldiers charging wildly across fields and hills like billowing ghostly shadows. The spying mill hand receives instructions from the “junk dealer,” who is from enemy territory, to give a signal as soon as the defenders, ordered to retreat, occupy the mill. When he has reservations, the junk dealer puts him under intense pressure and threatens him. Their own soldiers withdraw, and enemy soldiers storm in and occupy the mill. Michael wants to resist the enemy and picks a fight with the commanding officer, a lieutenant. He is immediately taken away and is to be tried by court-martial. The death sentence demanded by the captain is a mere formality and is to be carried out the following day. Meanwhile, the captain of the enemy troops makes advances toward Magda. The mill-hand spy then signals the enemy troops, who fire in the direction of the mill, endangering their opponents. As a result, even the fat captain keeps his hands off Magda, and for the time being the girl is safe from him. A little later, the captain orders that Michael finally be shot. Magda manages to reach him and begs for her brother’s life. The sleazy captain senses another chance to get somewhere with Magda. “You can save your brother,” the officer offers, in an unmistakably suggestive way. Disgusted, Magda runs off, followed by the young lieutenant who arrested Michael at the mill. He offers to help her too, but without ulterior motives. Magda can no longer believe such promises and tears herself away from him. At the mill, the homegrown spy working for the enemy again declares his love for Magda and even offers to betray his employers, the enemy soldiers. Disgusted by his obviously fickle loyalties, she leaves him standing there and hurries away. The lieutenant’s attempt to plead with his superior on Michael’s behalf comes to nothing. He goes to Magda and promises to rescue Michael on his own. Just as he is about to kiss Magda, the old miller enters, looking deeply distressed. Winter has set in overnight, and the captain is told that the prisoner has escaped. The lieutenant had earlier sent the guard away with an order. Meanwhile, the spy uses the mill wheels coming to a halt to send a secret signal to other soldiers, who then open fire on the mill. The enemy occupiers decide that the mill must be set on fire that very day. Michael suddenly appears before his father, wearing an enemy uniform. He got the uniform from the lieutenant, who has fallen in love with Magda and is loved in return; wearing it, Michael can move safely through enemy lines. The lieutenant advises Magda to hide Michael’s civilian clothes and cover his tracks. She goes with her new love down to the mill cellar, unaware that the spineless spy has taken refuge there. They hide Michael’s clothes, and the spy watches them. The lieutenant and Magda confess their love for each other. Once the war is over, nobody will be anyone’s enemy anymore, and he will return to her peacefully. Before setting fire to the mill as planned, the captain wants to search it once more from top to bottom for the escaped Michael. When the cellar hatch is opened, Magda and her lieutenant are interrupted while they are cuddling. Magda manages to hide in time. When the secret telephone line is discovered, the captain immediately assumes that his mysterious lieutenant has been using it to send secret messages to the enemy. He leaves the lieutenant his revolver so he can shoot himself. Upstairs in the mill, the miller and Johannes are led outside with the greatest reluctance, since the mill is to be set alight in five minutes. Trapped in the cellar, the lieutenant furiously accuses Magda over the telephone line, believing that one of the miller’s family members may have installed it. She thinks quickly and replies that the newly hired mill hand must have done it. They can no longer escape upstairs, because the mill has already begun to burn and the cellar entrance is blocked. Half-mad with fear, the spy now crawls out of his hiding place and confesses everything. The two men then engage in a fierce struggle. The spy screams like a madman and calls on the enemy soldiers rushing to the cellar window to kill him. They shoot him dead. Magda and her lieutenant are then pulled out of the smoky, burning cellar into the open. The mill is now a sea of flames. The miller and Johannes manage, at the last moment, to save Johannes’s heavily pregnant wife, who has already gone into labor. They make a makeshift bed for her out of straw. And while a brief moment of peace settles over the miller’s family after the mill has burned down, the war between the two sides continues to rage with undiminished ferocity. Looking at the charred skeleton of his mill, the old miller says, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do!”