Directed by a Bulgarian who had studied Eisenstein’s editing and typage, based on an original screenplay co-written by Bertolt Brecht, and scored with music by Hanns Eisler, Kuhle Wampe (shown in America as Whither Germany?) was the first—and last—German film of the period to express an openly Communist viewpoint. Thousands of anti-Hitler leftist youth volunteered as extras for the crowd scenes. The story is of an unemployed Berlin family that, instead of turning to fascism, finds solace by uniting with other out-of-work citizens in a tent city on the outskirts of town and finds hope, in the last reel, by joining a sports festival sponsored by radical unions. Naturally, the film was banned instantly by the government for insulting the Reich and religion and for scenes of nudity. That Kuhle Wampe has become only a footnote to film history is unfortunate, for nowhere in the cinema has Brecht’s aesthetic and political theory been so well dramatized and illuminated.