Unterwegs zu Lenin (1970)

A train travels across the vast expanses of Russia, carrying German prisoners of war returning home. Traveling with them is Viktor Kleist, a young German Communist from an intellectual Munich family, also making his way back to his homeland. During the journey, the stages of his own journey to Lenin come back to him. It begins in Munich, in the days after the assassination of USPD politician Kurt Eisner. Viktor escaped the subsequent wave of arrests only because he was able to win over the examining magistrate by telling him of his former membership in the Wandervogel movement. The first place he found shelter on the flight that followed was with his fiancée, Lore, who worked as a teacher at a girls’ boarding school run by Frau von Roettger. There, his old friend and comrade Martin Schenzinger tracked him down, and the two set off together for Berlin. There they discovered an anarchist revolutionary bohemia and a working class ready to fight. The KPD tasked them with personally delivering two letters and two bundles of newspapers to Lenin in Moscow. At the request of a friend of Viktor’s mother—a widow of a tsarist general living in Potsdam—they were to take her son George along. He was supposed to collect the pension that had stopped arriving from the new government in the Kremlin on his mother’s behalf. Since George spoke Russian, they agreed and set off as a group of three. They ran into their first difficulties at the German border with Lithuania and had to leave the two bundles of newspapers behind. In Lithuania, the addresses where they were supposed to call no longer existed, but they managed to press on, despite being pursued by the police. One night, they came to a farmhouse, where they were received very coolly. They wondered whether the people there had something against them—or whether they were even about to be betrayed. No: Viktor and Martin had “merely” spoiled the young farming couple’s wedding night. At last, after reaching Russia, they were promptly arrested by the Red Army. Once the situation had been clarified, Viktor was immediately flown to Moscow. There, at a hotel, he met a commissar who intended to take him to Lenin, but the meeting did not come off. The leading comrades of the Moscow Komsomol then took charge of him, and he worked with the revolutionary Lena on an appeal to the Communist Youth International. A tender affection grew between them. But when he learned that the young Bavarian Soviet Republic had been crushed, Viktor decided to return to Germany soon. At last, he met Lenin himself, who brought Viktor’s revolutionary romanticism down to earth and gave him a program for the struggle in Western Europe. On the train, full of soldiers returning from captivity, he sits beside a Mecklenburg farm laborer who believes the revolution will be good for him too, though the old submissiveness is still deeply ingrained in him. As Germany draws near, the revolutionary understanding Viktor has just gained begins to fade again—an experience that makes clear to him the challenge of the times.