The unconquerables
The Invincible is a German DEFA film directed by Arthur Pohl from 1953.
action
In 1889 the miners strike in Westphalia. The locksmith Schulz comes to them from Berlin to encourage them and to hand over money from the Berlin workers. In contrast to the leader of the strike, he believes that the miners are about to meet their demands. The leader, in turn, is of the opinion that he can go to Kaiser Wilhelm II with a delegation and be heard there. When the delegation arrived in Berlin, she was received by the Kaiser, but had to leave without having achieved anything and was arrested back in Westphalia.
Schulz's commitment once again drew the police's attention to the “Red”, but they cannot prove any socialist activities that would have led to prison terms because of the Socialist Act . Like Schulz, the young Franz, the friend of Schulz's daughter Gertrud, is also active in the underground for the Social Democrats. They print leaflets and stick their own slogans over posters against the socialists. Schulz, in turn, is always in close contact with the Reichstag members August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht .
The police decided to recruit Köppke, a worker who was arrested for possession of socialist documents, as an informant. In return, not only should money flow, but his previous prison sentence for theft should also be forgotten. Köppke agrees and is now spying on the Schulz family. He tries to start a relationship with Gertrud, who is cool about him. One night, however, Köppke saw Schulz come home with a package full of leaflets. He informs the police and a little later breaks into the apartment to find the hiding place for the leaflets. Mother Schulz and Gertrud try at the last second to hide the leaflets in another place, but they are discovered by accident. Father Schulz is imprisoned. Since Gertrud found a button from Köppke's jacket in the first hiding place of the leaflets, the comrades now know who the traitor is in their ranks. Köppke is now considered a non-person and is cut.
Eleven months later, the Schulz family's situation is bad without their father. They had to move to another apartment and barely earn enough money to survive. There is a vote in the Reichstag on the Socialist Law - the MPs overturn the law and Schulze is released from prison a little later. At the first official meeting of August Bebel, at which he evokes the unity of the workers, father and mother Schulz finally stand in the front row.
production
The film was shot within 100 days. It premiered on April 10, 1953 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin and in the Defa-Filmtheater Kastanienallee. On August 31, 1953, the film ran for the first time on DFF 1 on television.
The invincible was originally planned as the centerpiece of a trilogy by Heino Brandes . Part 1 should deal with the publication of the Communist Manifesto and the beginning of industrialization around the middle of the 19th century, and Part 3 deal with the development of the SPD between Bebel's death (1913) and Karl Liebknecht's anti-war speech (1916). However, it remained the only film made and the first DEFA film on the history of the socialist German labor movement . According to FB Habel, "the social democratic roots of socialism in the GDR [...] were later only an issue in terms of their undesirable developments and failures".
criticism
The contemporary criticism of the GDR praised the performance in the film. Arthur Pohl also achieved, together with Joachim Hasler, "an atmospheric density and uniformity of the images and scenes that even carries over many conventional and superfluous fin-de-siècle adornments".
"The first technically and staged well-made and if tendentious but not perfidious Defa film since Wolfgang Staudte's Der Untertan (1951) is here," wrote Der Spiegel on the occasion of the film's premiere in 1953.
The film-dienst called The Invincibles “an outwardly lavish, dramatically haunting chapter on early social democracy, which comes across as drama at times sluggish and lecturing. As a historical-biographical attempt on the history of the workers' movement in Germany, it is worth seeing, not least for historical reasons: The resistance of the SPD against Kaiser and Bismarck is used as a legitimation for the establishment of the GDR and the current SED policy. "
The Interministerial Committee for East-West Film Issues forbade the showing in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Awards
On October 6, 1953, Willy A. Kleinau, Karl Paryla and Arthur Pohl were awarded the National Prize for Art and Literature, Second Class, for their performance in Die Unbesiegbaren .
literature
- Frank-Burkhard Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films. The complete documentation of all DEFA feature films from 1946 to 1993. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 635–636.
Web links
- The Invincible in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The invincible at filmportal.de
- The invincible at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ^ Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, pp. 77-78.
- ^ Frank-Burkhard Habel : The large lexicon of DEFA feature films. The complete documentation of all DEFA feature films from 1946 to 1993. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , p. 635.
- ↑ Hans Ulrich Eylau: The workers are invincible . In: Berliner Zeitung , April 17, 1953.
- ↑ Kind-hearted Bebel . In: Der Spiegel , No. 20, 1953, p. 26.
- ↑ The Invincibles. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Stefan Buchloh: Perverse, harmful to young people, hostile to the state. Censorship in the Adenauer era as a mirror of the social climate . Frankfurt 2002, pp. 224-226
- ↑ See defa.de