Refugees (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | refugees |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language |
German Chinese English Russian |
| Publishing year | 1933 |
| length | 81 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Gustav Ucicky |
| script |
Gerhard Menzel based on his novel of the same name (1933) |
| production | Günther Stapenhorst (production group leader) for the UFA |
| music | Herbert Windt |
| camera | Fritz Arno Wagner |
| cut | Eduard von Borsody |
| occupation | |
| |
Refugees is a German adventure fiction film from 1933 with nationalist and Nazi propaganda elements . Directed by Gustav Ucicky play Hans Albers and Käthe von Nagy , the leading roles.
action
Not far from the Russian-Chinese border, in Harbin . The Manchurian city has been in turmoil for days . Foreign powers have sent soldiers - Chinese meet Red Army soldiers, British and Japanese. Several western foreigners soon got into the fighting. On the afternoon of August 6, 1928, three of them decided to flee the serious unrest. The German engineer Laudy and a companion discovered a wanted poster on a wall, on which he was wanted for alleged industrial espionage. The Russians exposed 5000 rubles to his arrest. A Soviet inspector drives through the city with his people, shoots at random with his MG attached to the car at the crowded locals who are thirsting for water in the scorching heat and runs over people and their belongings with the vehicle. The British soldiers protecting the diplomatic quarter of Harbins do not care about the suffering and misery of the people.
A small group of Volga Germans who fled the Bolshevik terror in the USSR to Harbin want to head south to the next port in order to travel from there to Germany. A League of Nations commission meeting in Harbin at the same time is incapable of taking important decisions, as there is once again disagreement among the delegates on key issues. Neither the residents of Harbin nor the international refugees can expect help from them and other diplomats, on the contrary: When an attempt was made to penetrate the barricaded and heavily guarded conference venue, they were stopped at gunpoint by British soldiers deployed to protect the diplomats. While the German delegate was giving a lecture in the hall about the harassment of the Volga Germans, Soviet units came and picked up several men waiting for help in front of the conference venue in order to abduct them. One of them shouts loudly “I don't want to go back to Moscow!”.
In this general turmoil, a European man in a bright Chinese dress uniform steps down the stairs of the consulate palace and is immediately snapped at by Laudy. He then only gives cool instructions in English to his people to "clean" the stairs of the crowds. With bayonets attached, you clear an alley for the tall man. In the direct confrontation with Laudy and his sister Kristja, the man suddenly speaks German and shows the desperate people only contempt for their beggar and protest mentality, which was so typical of post-war Germany. In an argument with them, it bursts out of him. This German, who worked for the Chinese, had once left his home after being illegally imprisoned for four years and three months - including "loss of honor, position under police supervision, awarded by the state for my love for the fatherland", as he did bitterly lamented. His contempt for post-war Germany with its democracy, which drove him abroad far from home, is obviously limitless. The officer is Arneth and is deeply embittered from the lost for Germany World War returned home. A call by Chiang Kai-Shek once brought him to China , where he now works as an instruction officer for the Kuomintang government.
When Arneth asks the provincial government military ruler for a vehicle to leave Harbin, he is not helped. Thereupon he also takes his fate into his own hands. In the meantime, the German refugees have gathered on a side track at the Harbin train station. Soviet soldiers are looking for people who have fled Russia; water is scarce. The situation of the refugees is becoming more and more desperate. Soon no trains will be allowed to leave Harbin. The city is now under fire and Arneth is walking through smoking ruins. There he finds a horse tied to a wall, next to its owner, who was killed in an attack. Arneth now has a means of transport that could get him out of town, while the other Germans, looking for a working well, find a parked train that they immediately seize under shell fire. Finally, Laudy suffers a malaria-related weakness and can no longer lead the group. Kristja takes care of him. Arneth also saw the train and immediately got on the locomotive. He and Laudy's Germans soon become a community of fate on the run from the Bolsheviks and the turmoil of the revolution.
However, a large shell funnel at the freight yard makes it impossible to take the train down because the shelling of the shells destroyed the departure tracks. Arneth and the others plan at great risk to fill up the funnel again and restore the tracks. In view of the cohesion of all Germans abroad, the cynical and bitter Arneth is gradually beginning to regain trust in the people. They have one goal in common: to escape the horror and see their homeland again. But soon the little drinking water that Arneth was able to organize is used up and mutiny among the refugees ensues. Some of them try to quench their thirst with the water from the locomotive boiler, but the locomotive cannot run without water. Arneth then shoots Mannlinger, the leader of the mutineers, and is able to convince the others that they have no chance of escaping without the train, which can only be started with the water.
In the meantime a Volga German has gone to the Soviet Commissar in charge and denounced Laudy, whom she recognized thanks to the profile. However, she is not speculating on Judas' wages of 5,000 rubles, she is simply demanding that the Commissioner release her husband, who has just been arrested by the Soviets in Harbin. While the leveling of the shell hole was proceeding, the Volga Germans learned from the Soviet Commissioner that he had received orders to have the 45 remaining Volga Germans shot - "to make an example," as he says. When the Volga German hears this, she collapses in horror. She didn't want that. Some men, who do not believe in the success of Arneth's escape plan, use Arneth's temporary absence to mutiny again; they simply stop working on the shell hole. As soon as Arneth has returned from his secret nightly procurement of materials, the dwarf uprising immediately collapses under his authoritarian leadership style. During this night and in the following morning hours, work was carried out at full speed, the funnel straightened and the new rails laid. And while a life goes out, a new one arises in the same second: One of Arneth's most loyal helpers, young Peter, dies as a result of a gunshot while a heavily pregnant Volga German gives birth to her baby. But the Soviet Commissioner is already on the trail of the refugees, and he lights up every corner of Harbin with a headlight mounted on his emergency vehicle.
It is dawn and Laudy has recovered a little. He climbs into the locomotive and carefully drives it over the repaired area. The rails give slightly under the heavy load of the train, but they hold. The jubilation is indescribable, and all the refugees quickly get on the wagons. The Soviet Commissioner and his men approach the train and have them shot at. Arneth has gone to the penultimate carriage. A grenade thrown by a Russian derailed the last wagon. This is now rattling on the gravel bed next to the tracks. As a result, the entire escape threatens to fail, as the train cannot really pick up speed. With all his physical effort Arneth uncouples this last, already heavily smoking wagon from the train and then runs, under Soviet fire, over the front wagon roofs to the locomotive. Meanwhile, the High Commission of the League of Nations, meeting in Harbin, decided to adjourn regarding the refugee problem and the harassment of the Volga Germans. Only the German delegate votes against, shamefully abandoned by everyone. Meanwhile, Arneth, Kristja Laudy, her brother and the others are rolling towards freedom.
Production notes
The shooting took place from July to mid-September 1933. Refugees passed the film censorship on December 1, 1933 and premiered on December 8, 1933 in Berlin's UFA-Palast am Zoo .
UFA production group leader Günther Stapenhorst also took over the production management, his production assistant was Erich von Neusser . The production manager was Otto Lehmann . The extensive film structures come from Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig . Hermann Fritzsching provided the sound , Werner Krien assisted chief cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner .
The marching song Weit is the way back to the homeland, so far, far, far from Ernst Erich Buder was used in the 1931 film The Other Side .
Refugees was the first film to be awarded the newly created National Socialist State Prize on May 1, 1934. In addition, it received the title “State-politically and artistically valuable”. In 1945 the Allied military authorities banned the showing of the film in Germany.
The multilingual Baltic German Andrews Engelman , who embodies the unscrupulous Soviet Commissioner, is the only one of the actors who speaks all four languages spoken in the film.
A French version produced at the same time was created under the title Au bout du monde . The French Henri Chomette was assigned to Ucicky as dialogue director. While Käthe von Nagy repeated her part in this version, Pierre Blanchar took on the Albers role. However, in Au bout du monde, the German characters were given French names.
As a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact at the end of August 1939, refugees were removed from the program again due to its strongly anti-Soviet tenor. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, refugees was released by the film censorship on August 2, 1941 for re-screening in Germany.
The film contains an abundance of propaganda elements that are deeply in line with National Socialist views:
- Arneth, portrayed by Hans Albers, is deeply disappointed by the German parliamentarism of the Weimar Republic , but in the course of the film develops into a classic leader figure who does not discuss, but commands. The change that took place within his personality from embittered egoist and pessimist to active warrior who dares to venture out to new horizons is also intended to document and reflect the change that took place in Germany in 1933.
- The international diplomats talk to no end without really doing things for the better. Dodge, objections and postponements determine the procedure. Some delegates yawn or sleep, others sneer at them. Nobody seems interested in the suffering of the local people. The League of Nations, whose representatives meet here in Harbin, is recorded and denounced as an ineffective and superfluous gossip.
- The Soviet commissioners are brutal and brutal in their approach, their leadership is portrayed as barbaric.
- Their British counterparts, the English soldiers posted to protect the international conference participants, are portrayed as stubborn, cold and unemotional. When the Soviet commissioner asked his British counterpart in search of Laudy, he even cooperated with him.
Reviews
“REFUGEES, her next work, was based on the film author's novel. Ucicky realized the story of a group of Volga Germans who, under the leadership of a democratically embittered but finally nationally awakened republic refugee from Manchuria, which was fought over by Soviet and Japanese troops, returned to the Reich. In the figure of the hero - occupied by Hans Albers - equipped as a leader, with iron energy, determination and ruthlessness, but nonetheless “sympathetic and human”, the hero cult of the new regime is conveyed. His opponents, drawn in no less woodcut style, are intended as representatives of nasty subhumanism, but yet so unrestrained that they promote the attraction of being an outsider. "
“With“ Refugees ”[…] suddenly the“ new ”film is here, which has been demanded and sought after since the National Socialist Revolution. This film is carried by the “new spirit”, because it embodies the high moral ideas of self-help and the leadership principle. [...] It really turned out what we have asked again and again from film, what must be demanded if the film is to be anything else than a superficial pastime, if it is to give people more than a few hours to look at pictures. Here is also an attitude, a conviction, here is a supporting, formative idea, and it is not a sprinkling, not a wordy episode in the film scene [...] And it is not an idea that would be alien to us, but one that is timely : working, struggling, dying for a high goal, the commitment of each for all, the unifying belief in the liberating power of self-sacrificing, awakened and held by an individual. [...] Hans Albers is once again the daring adventurer here, but not more arrogant than the whole thing allows. He experiences his role with the last nerve and fills it with his great art, which after this performance as a “refugee” and as a tough, indomitable leader, will probably no longer be doubted by anyone. [...] This film has become a true German mirror. "
“First dramatic adventure film that exactly met the demands of the new Nazi rulers on film production and received the State Prize 1933/34 for it: In a pseudo-historical framework, the League of Nations is mocked, the Führer principle is glorified and the bond with blood and soil heroized (“ For something die - I wish for death ")."
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ according to Deutsche Tonfilme, Volume 4, born 1933. Berlin 2001, p. 40. Filmportal.de names October 1933 as the end of the shoot
- ↑ See Ulrich J. Klaus: Deutsche Tonfilme, Volume 12, born in 1942/43. Berlin 2001, p. 158 f.
- ↑ Ulrich J. Klaus: Deutsche Tonfilme, 4th year 1933, page 40, Berlin / Berchtesgaden 1992 and Volume 14, supplements 1929 / 30-1945, p. 113, Berlin 2004
- ↑ Cf. Bogusław Drewniaks 'Der deutsche Film 1938–1945', an overview. Düsseldorf 1987, p. 650.
Web links
- Refugees in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Refugees at filmportal.de