The song of the sailors
The Song of the Sailors is a German DEFA film by Kurt Maetzig and Günter Reisch from 1958 .
action
Autumn 1917: When the sailors Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch were sentenced to death and shot for incitement to disobey orders and to go on mass strikes, the sailors assigned to the SMS Friedrich der Große refused to carry out the order because they did not shoot their own men want. Machinist Erich Steigert, who pronounces this decision out loud, is arrested. Only after repeated refusals by other troops are Köbis and Reichpietsch finally executed by soldiers.
A little later the SMS Friedrich der Große is at sea. In Russia the workers' revolution was successful and the sailors on board are starting to plan the revolution in their own country. When the German freighter is about to attack a Russian one, it soon turns out that the cargo ship has an engine failure. Some sailors and their superiors are brought to the freighter for repair work, repair the ship and finally disarm the German officers. Machinist Henne Lobke and stoker Jens Kasten befriend the Russians, but their fraternization on land is suddenly interrupted. Germans open fire on the men and Henne is shot. He comes to the hospital in Schwerin , with Jens staying by his side. Henne falls in love with young Anna, who promises to come to Kiel later .
In Kiel, Henne and Jens pretend to have escaped from Russian captivity . They are recognized for their bravery. In the meantime, the situation in Kiel has worsened. Although the First World War is lost, the Admiralty decides to allow the entire German fleet to sail towards England, thereby leaving all men to die. While Henne, Jens, but above all the experienced chief heater August Lenz, now want to prepare the uprising, other sailors, including the young radio operator Batuschek, are not getting on quickly enough. Henne travels to Berlin to get support from Karl Liebknecht . Although this does not happen, Batuschek feigns unity. The uprising broke out at sea, led by Lenz. The sailors occupy the SMS Friedrich der Große , but the generals soon succeed in creating a disagreement between the sailors, especially since Lenz realizes that Batuschek lied. Although the generals promise impunity for the insurgents, all the sailors are arrested on land.
The doubting Jupp, whose mother is in a relationship with Lenz and who works as a mole for the sailors in the detention center , is now active. He prints out leaflets calling for strikes and protests, which are distributed across the city. The workers gather, led by the escaped Batuschek, and thousands march to the Kiel detention center. Heavily pregnant Anna is also there by chance. When the soldiers open fire on the protesters in front of the institution, Jupp's mother is killed. Anna, on the other hand, senses that the birth of her child is imminent. Jupp smuggles her into the detention center, where Anna gives birth to her child.
In a second attack by the sailors and workers, the institution is stormed. All prisoners are released and the officers arrested. The insurgents seem to have triumphed. At night, however, a representative of the USPD appears to inform the insurgents that the SPD politician Gustav Noske and the defector Wandres will henceforth represent their interests. The men around Lenz and Steigert are horrified, especially since all officers are released on official orders. The sailors now want to build a fortress that no one else can take: a party of their own.
A short time later, Hennes and Jupp are in Berlin. Jupp has been signed off and no longer wants to be involved in the revolution because he believes the sailors have lost. Henne thinks ahead and sees the workers' own party as progress. When they say goodbye, the hateful soldier lets Schuckert shoot them. Hen dies. Jupp discovers the delegate card for the founding party congress of the KPD . He took them and later found himself at the party congress - with Ludwig Batuschek, Anna, Erich Steigert, August Lenz and Jens Kasten.
production
The Song of the Sailors was created under the working title Song of the Seven Sailors . It was realized as a commissioned production by the GDR, so DEFA had to undertake to complete the film by the 40th anniversary of the November Revolution, with the Kiel sailors' uprising being the central theme . The film was made "under enormous time pressure" with two different recording rods: While director Kurt Maetzig shot the scenes about the officers and admirals, director Reisch took care of the scenes about the sailors. Individual storylines are told or linked by a song sung by Karl-Heinz Weichert .
Scenes that take place in Kiel in the film were shot in Görlitz . Other scenes were created in Rostock and Warnemünde . At times, up to 15,000 extras were involved in the shoot. Filming ended in late September 1958.
The film premiered on November 9, 1958 in Berlin's Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle . The occasion was a ceremony of the Central Committee of the SED, the Council of Ministers of the GDR and the National Council of the National Front.
criticism
The contemporary criticism of the GDR called the song of the sailors 1958 "a weighty weapon in the political struggle of our day" because it reports "of the strength of the proletariat because it lets us learn from mistakes". Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler praised the camera work by Joachim Hasler and Otto Merz in the film mirror , as both cameramen had "broken new ground" and found "bold and unusual image compositions and camera movements".
Der Spiegel smugly wrote on the occasion of the shooting:
“[The screenwriters] Wiens and Egel prepared an exposé in which they glorified the revolutionary phase in the life story of seven mutinous sailors in a ballad-like form that the rebels of 1918 herald the 'German Democratic Republic'.
Above all, however, the author couple endeavored to glamourize the actions of the Spartacists in their portrayal of the revolution , which the Saxon journeyman carpenter Walter Ulbricht had also joined in 1918 . According to the ex-Spartakus bundler Ulbricht, the Spartakists alone would have been able to make a complete socialist revolution in the spirit of the Bolsheviks if their efforts had not been thwarted by the machinations of the opportunist SPD. "
Other critics wrote in 1994 that the film was “always impressive when its authors describe specific living conditions: for example the miserable food on the warships. Otherwise, the film remains stuck to the canon of the times: contrary to historical truth, it stylizes the sailors' uprising as a little October revolution and over-emphasizes the role of the Spartacus League. "
For the film service , Das Lied der Sailors was "careful in its design, but wooden and bold in the implementation of the obvious agitational intentions."
The Protestant film observer drew the following conclusion: “The historical events are used for pathetic class struggle agitation. At least some good crowd scenes can be seen. For those interested in film history from 16. "
Award
The Song of the Sailors was awarded the diploma of the Soviet Peace Committee at the Moscow Film Festival in 1959 .
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 363-365 .
Web links
- The song of the sailors in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The song of the sailors at filmportal.de (with complete film)
- The song of the sailors at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Ralf Schenk (ed.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (ed.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 134.
- ↑ Habel, p. 364.
- ↑ a b The Song of the Sailors . In: Der Spiegel , No. 37, 1958, p. 59.
- ^ Horst Knietzsch in: Neues Deutschland , November 11, 1958.
- ↑ Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler in: Filmspiegel , No. 24, 1958, p. 3.
- ↑ The Song of the Sailors. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Evangelical Press Association, Munich, Review No. 492/1969
- ↑ Cf. progress-film ( memento of the original from July 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
