Brüder (1929)

With film novices from the milieu being depicted—dockworkers, workers’ wives and their children, among others—playing dockworkers, businessmen, mothers, police officers, employees, officials and drunkards, individual scenes from the Hamburg dockworkers’ strike of 1896–97, which lasted around eleven months, are recreated as authentically as possible. Through the story of a committed docker, the film recounts the beginnings of the strike, the collapse of port operations, and solidarity contributions from Great Britain and Denmark, as well as the weather conditions that further aggravated the situation during that winter. The strike even reaches into families, leading to confrontations there, such as that between the two brothers named in the title—one a dockworker, the other a police officer. In the end, the strike revolt is crushed, but the class-struggle ideal of fairer—indeed, better—pay and more equitable working conditions, conveyed in the film’s final message through a fluttering, red-tinted flag, lives on.